Das Monitoring des sorbischen Schrifttums. Grundlagen und erster Jahresbericht eines neuen Forschungsvorhabens

Abstract

The Monitoring of Sorbian Literature. Theoretical Bases and the First Annual Report of a New Research Project

This article is conceived as research report for a new, long-term project of the Sorbian Institute, in which an essential part of all Sorbian printed materials published in a calendar year – starting with the year 2019 – is processed in digital form into corpus texts of high quality; it is then subsequently examined with regard to the vocabulary used in it. The background, methodology and aims of the research project are explained. In addition, this article represents the first annual report, which presents the results of the analyses of the corpus texts of the first year of monitoring. As well as presenting a current picture of the lexicon used in the latest literature, which involves the identification of “new words” and a perspective on the changes in the vocabulary of Upper and Lower Sorbian, this new monitoring process offers an enormous potential for Sorbian linguistics, especially with regard to a synchronic and up-to-date description of both the two Sorbian literary languages, but also, in the long term, with regard to phenomena of language change.