(''dolnoserbšćina'') is a
Slavic Minority Language spoken in eastern
Germany in the historical province of
Lower Lusatia , today part of
Brandenburg . It is one of the two literary
Sorbian Languages , the other being
Upper Sorbian .
Lower Sorbian is spoken in and around the city of
Cottbus in
Brandenburg . Signs in this region are usually bilingual, and Cottbus has a ''
Gymnasium '' where the language of instruction is Lower Sorbian.
The phonology of Lower Sorbian has been greatly influenced by
Contact with
German , especially in Cottbus and larger towns. For example, German-influenced pronunciation tends to have a
Uvular Trill instead of the alveolar trill , and a "clear" that is not especially
Palatalized instead of . In villages and rural areas German influence is less marked, and the pronunciation is more "typically Slavic".
The
Consonant Phoneme s of Lower Sorbian are as follows:
Lower Sorbian has both
Final Devoicing and regressive
Voicing Assimilation :
- "oak" is pronounced
- "(female) neighbor" is pronounced
- "number" is pronounced
The postalveolar fricative is assimilated to before :
- "protection" is pronounced
The
Vowel phonemes are as follows:
Stress in Lower Sorbian normally falls on the first
Syllable of the word:
In
Loanword s, stress may fall on any of the last three syllables:
- ''internat'' "boarding school"
- ''kontrola'' "control"
- ''september'' "September"
- ''policija'' "police"
- ''organizacija'' "organization"
The
Sorbian Alphabet is based on the
Latin Alphabet but uses
Diacritic s such as
Acute Accent and
Caron . The standard character encoding for the Lower Sorbian alphabet is
ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2).
