Sorbian settlement area

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The officially recognized settlement area of ​​the Sorbs

As Sorbian settlement area (in Brandenburg officially settlement area of the Sorbs / Wends ; Lower Sorbian Serbski sedleński rum , Upper Sorbian Serbski sydlenski rum ) is generally that space in the east of Saxony called and southern Brandenburg, where the West Slavic people of the Sorbs (in Brandenburg as Wenden referred ) is autochthonous . Colloquially, the Sorbian settlement area is also referred to as Sorbian land ; Before 1945, the term Wendei was also in use - sometimes pejoratively .

This area has steadily shrunk in the past centuries as a result of assimilation , Germanization and exposure to brown coal opencast mines . In addition, the commitment to the Sorbian people is free according to federal and state laws and may not be verified, for example through censuses . Therefore, there are very different approaches to delimitation. Professing Sorbs or Sorbian speakers do not constitute the majority of the population in most of the municipalities in this area, but a - sometimes very small - minority.

Officially recognized settlement area

The officially recognized, so-called "ancestral settlement area" is defined in state laws and regulations of the states of Saxony and Brandenburg. For the Free State, the area is permanently defined by the law on the rights of the Sorbs in the Free State of Saxony ( Saxon Sorbs Act for short ). The demarcation is largely based on Arnošt Muka's statistics from the 1880s. This practice corresponds to the claim to want to preserve and protect the settlement area, although especially in the eastern part ( Görlitz district ) there are places within the settlement area in which the Sorbian language is de facto hardly present in everyday life.

In contrast to this, the Brandenburg law on the structuring of the rights of the Sorbs / Wends in the state of Brandenburg ( Sorbs / Wends for short ) until the amendment in 2014 required proof of "continuous linguistic and cultural" from those communities that feel they belong to the settlement area Sorbian (Wendish) tradition up to the present ”. This scheme was developed by Sorbian representatives and minority rights activists criticized, among other reasons, because on the one hand, the goodwill of the community, that is the political will to promote the Sorbian presupposes and on the other hand, the evidence mainly a continuous linguistic tradition because in the past in Prussia very Much stricter assimilation policy and suppression of the Sorbs / Wends in many cases made difficult. Evidence of linguistic or cultural tradition is now sufficient; The Council for Sorbian / Wendish Affairs can also apply to join the settlement area.

Bilingual place-name sign (Sorbian below) and road sign (Sorbian above)

The communities and associations in the settlement area are responsible for promoting and developing the Sorbian language and culture, for example through bilingual street signs, building signs and the presence of Sorbian in public. Bilingual websites should follow. Bilingual place-name signs and signs are already mandatory. In practice, however, these requirements are not consistently implemented, apart from the core settlement area (see below). In Brandenburg, municipalities in the settlement area have officially been given a German-Lower Sorbian double name as the only officially permissible name since the new Sorbs / Wends Act came into force in 2014.

The area currently includes the following municipalities and parts of the municipality:

Historic settlement area

Settlement area according to Smoler 1843. Muka determined a larger extent 40 years later in more detailed research.
Excerpt from the "Map of German Dialects" ( Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon , 1894): The Sorbian language island was separated from the rest of the Slavic language area; German was predominant only in the cities (Bautzen, Spremberg and Cottbus along the Spree and Hoyerswerda and Wittichenau to the west of it).

Depending on which historical West Slavic peoples belong to the Sorbian group and which century you are looking at, there are different ways of describing the historical settlement area. It is known that Martin Luther made derogatory comments on the Sorbian population in the villages around Wittenberg in the early 16th century . Another point of reference are language bans in individual cities, e.g. B. 1327 in Leipzig , 1377 in Altenburg , Zwickau and Chemnitz , which testify to the existence of Sorbian in these places. In the northeast the area bordered seamlessly on the settlement area of ​​the Poles (near Crossen and Sorau ). Sorbian was also spoken in some villages on the right bank of the Bober and Oder until the 17th century. In any case, place names such as Dresden , Leipzig, Meißen , Chemnitz or Torgau are all of Sorbian origin.

The first systematic investigations into the size of the Sorbian settlement area were carried out in the 19th century by Jan Arnošt Smoler (1843) and in more detail by Arnošt Muka (1884/85). While Smoler's main interest lay in collecting folklore, Muka wandered through the villages of Upper and Lower Lusatia to find out about the state of the language in the individual places. In addition to detailed statistics, there are also extensive reports of conversations with the residents of the places visited. Overall, Muka came to a number of around 166,000 Sorbs; At the same time, however, he also described the rapid Germanization of Sorbian places, especially in Niederlausitz .

Core settlement area

Today, the Sorbian "heartland" is usually seen as the area in which the Sorbian language is still everyday language and is firmly anchored in the population.

In Upper Lusatia this is the predominantly Catholic triangle between the cities of Bautzen, Kamenz and Hoyerswerda, in the narrower sense the five communities on Klosterwasser and the community of Radibor . In these areas, over half of the inhabitants speak Upper Sorbian. Parts of the communities of Göda , Neschwitz , Puschwitz and the city of Wittichenau also belong to the Upper Sorbian core settlement area; about a third of these are Sorbs.

In Lower Lusatia, the term can best be applied to the communities north of Cottbus (e.g. Drachhausen , Dissen-Striesow , Jänschwalde ). However, the Lower Sorbian language found there is far less present in everyday life and the communities with the highest proportions of Lower Sorbian-speaking population have only 15 to 30 percent Sorbs.

literature

  • Peter Kunze, Andreas Bensch: The Sorbs / Wends in Niederlausitz . A historical overview. In: Wobrazki ze Serbow . 2nd, revised edition. Domowina, Bautzen 2000 (first edition 1996), ISBN 3-7420-1668-7 .
  • Gertraud Eva Schrage: Upper Lusatia until 1346 . In: Joachim Bahlke (Ed.): History of Upper Lusatia . 2nd, revised edition, Leipziger Universitätsverlag, Leipzig 2004 (first edition 2001), ISBN 978-3-935693-46-2 , pp. 55–97.
  • Arnošt Muka : Statistika łužiskich Serbow [Statistics of the Lusatian Sorbs]. Self-published, Budyšin [Bautzen] 1884–1886; 5th edition under the title Serbski zemjepisny słowničk [Sorbian geographical dictionary]. Budyšin 1927; Reprint: Domowina, Bautzen 1979.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ On "Sorbenland" cf.
    Miriam Schönbach: There is a risk of teacher shortages in the Sorbian country. In: sz-online.de, August 16, 2016, accessed May 15, 2017, 6:45 pm; DPA: Early photographs from the Sorbian country. Berliner Morgenpost , October 22, 2016, archived from the original on April 10, 2019 . ;; Torsten Richter: With the camera in the Catholic Sorbian country. In: lr-online.de, July 20, 2012, accessed May 15, 2017, 6:50 pm; Karl Christian Kanis Gretschel : History of the Saxon People and State. Volume 1. Verlag von Reinhold Beyer, Leipzig 1841, p. 17ff. Cathrin Carmin Alisch: Weddings under the sunset of the Sorbs in Lusatia. Music, magic and minority in the mirror of cultural semiotics. LIT Verlag, Münster 2003, p. 18 u. 49; Reetta Toivanen: Minority Rights as a Resource of     Identity. The Sorbs in Germany and the Saams in Finland. LIT Verlag, Hamburg 2001, p. 11; Martin Kasper: The Lusatian Sorbs at the turn of 1989/1990. Domowina Verlag, 2000, p. 125.
    For "Wendei" cf.
    Karl Andree (Hrsg.): Globus: Illustrated magazine for country and ethnology. Second volume, Verlag vom Bibliographisches Institut, Bildburghausen 1862, p. 245 ff.
  2. ↑ Municipal constitution of the state of Brandenburg , Paragraph 9, Paragraph 4. Retrieved on January 7, 2017.
  3. ↑ cf. Appendix to the law in: Sächsisches Gesetz- und Verordnungsblatt, No. 7/1999
  4. ^ Law on the structuring of the rights of the Sorbs / Wends in the state of Brandenburg. State government of Brandenburg, accessed on January 21, 2015 (see § 14 SWG ​​- “Proclamation”).
  5. ↑ a b Ministry of Science, Research and Culture: settlement area / sedleński rum. Retrieved July 6, 2020.
  6. ^ Frido Mětšk : Serbsko-pólska rěčna hranica w 16. a 17. lětstotku [The Sorbian-Polish language border in the 16th and 17th centuries]. In: Lětopis , Series B, Volume III (1958), Ludowe nakładnistwo Domowina, Budyšin 1958, pp. 4–25.
  7. ↑ Dietmar Urmes : Handbook of geographical names. Marix Verlag, Wiesbaden 2004, ISBN 3-937715-70-3 .

Coordinates: 51 ° 30 '  N , 14 ° 15'  E