Upper Sorbian language

Upper Sorbian (endonym: hornjoserbšćina), occasionally referred to as Wendish (German: Wendisch), is a minority language spoken by Sorbs in the historical province of Upper Lusatia, today part of Saxony, Germany. It is a West Slavic language, along with Lower Sorbian, Czech, Polish, Silesian, Slovak, and Kashubian. It is now spoken by fewer than 10,000 people, mostly in Budyšin and its immediate countryside.

Upper Sorbian differs from its closest relative, Lower Sorbian (with which it forms the Sorbian subgroup), at all levels of the language system: in phonetics, morphology, and vocabulary. At the same time, the two languages share a number of features that distinguish them from other West Slavic languages—in particular, the preservation of the dual number, the retention of simple past tense forms of verbs, and an especially large number of lexical borrowings from German. Several linguistic features link Upper Sorbian with the Lechitic languages, while in a number of other features it is similar to the Czech-Slovak subgroup.

At present, in addition to everyday use (in dialectal or colloquial form), Upper Sorbian is used as a literary language in education, the mass media, science, and so on. Compared to Lower Sorbian, it has a larger number of speakers, a stricter literary norm, and greater stylistic differentiation. Nevertheless, the number of Upper Sorbian speakers is constantly declining, with the main speakers of the language generally being older members of the Sorbian community, whose main means of communication is not the literary language but dialects (which are best preserved in the areas of Upper Lusatia with a Catholic population). The writing system is based on the Latin alphabet; the earliest written records in Upper Sorbian date back to the 16th century.

Upper Sorbian is one of the minority languages in Germany that are officially recognized under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In the officially designated settlement area in Upper Lusatia, there are therefore, on the basis of the Saxon Sorbs Act, among other things, bilingual street and place name signs as well as state schools with Upper Sorbian as the language of instruction or Sorbian as a foreign language.