| 英文摘要 |
The West Slavic languages are a subcategory of the Slavic language group that includes Czech, Polish, Slovak, Sorbian and Cassubian. After the migration from east in the seventh century and survival from the two world wars in European Continent, currently the Sorbs are living in the eastern part of Germany, close to the border with the Czech Republic and Poland. The language of the Sorbs, or Wends3, linguistically has two standard varieties. One is Upper Sorbian, spoken by about 40,000 people in Saxony, and the other one is called Lower Sorbian, spoken by about 10,000 people in Brandenburg. (Schiemann 2000) Because of the long history of language contact with German, Upper and Lower Sorbian both are influenced by German not only morphologically but also in the syntactic level. With the “Law on the Framework Convention of the Council of Europe for the Protection of National Minorities” passed by the Federal Parliament on July 22, 1997, the Federal Republic of Germany enacted that members of the Sorbian nation belong among the protected and promoted national minority groups in Germany. Under the terms of the federal law on the “European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages” of July 9, 1998, Upper Sorbian and Lower Sorbian became, by law, recognized, protected and promoted as minority languages. After the confirmation of the legal status of Sorbian, there started so-called language planning work in the area. In the past 10 years, promotion of the Sorbian language has mainly been reflected in the increase in the Sorbian media available, the continued fundamental pursuit of a policy to promote nationalities and a guarantee of the right to acquire Sorbian by corresponding measures in the schools system. This paper is trying to conclude that the current language planning work in Sorbian is the standard product following by the main spirit of the European Union, i.e. to maintain the linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe. However, on the other hand, the language planning work (officially started from 2000) motivated by the Federal Republic of Germany also reflects one fact that Sorbs who struggle between Pan-Slavism and Germanic Peoples for a long time, are still unable to develop their own ethnic ideology and language independently. |