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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 834

Part of Session 179: Mutual intelligibility of closely related languages in a multilingual Europe (Other abstracts in this session)

The mutual intelligibility of Slavic languages and its potential for the Sorbian language revival

Authors: Sloboda, Marián (1); Brankatschk, Katja (2)
Submitted by: Sloboda, Marián (Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic)

Upper and Lower Sorbian are currently spoken by a few dozens of thousand speakers in the eastern part of Germany. One of the arguments which aims to “gain” new speakers for these Slavic languages and, thus, help revive them in a predominantly German-speaking setting is the argument that a knowledge of Sorbian can help one to understand, and possibly also to learn, other Slavic languages such as Czech, Polish or Russian more easily. Having turned this argument into a hypothesis, this paper presents results of measurement of intellibility of Czech, Polish and Slovak to students of the Sorbian secondary school in Bauzen, Lusatia, Germany. The test was carried out with both students of A classes, who usually come from Sorbian families and have mostly Sorbian as a medium of instruction, and students of B classes, who are usually of German descent, who have the Sorbian-medium part of their curriculum reduced and whose motivation for the language, as it showed up also during the testing, was much weaker compared to the A-class students. The test results show to what extent the two groups of students differ and to what extent the revivalist argument of Slavic intelligibility could be supported by factual comprehension of a short audio story in other Slavic languages. Certainly, the effectivity of this argument is a question which involves much more aspects of the linguistic situation in Lusatia and surely depends on the concrete actions by the Sorbian language activits. Nevertheless, the research presented here provides a certain empirical base for such an argument. The testing method used is identical to the one already applied to Scandinavian Germanic languages (Gookens 2007), which allows for some comparisons across language families. The research presented was part of a recently completed project whose goal was to measure linguistic intelligibility together with linguistic distances between the Slavic languages. Results for linguistic distances will also be presented.

Reference

Gooskens, C. (2007). The contribution of linguistic factors to the intelligibility of closely related languages. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 28 (6), 445-467.