Goro Christoph Kimura, How is the Sorbian language maintained?: A case study of a Catholic parish in Lusatia.

It has been pointed out that the Catholic church has significantly contributed to the maintenance of the Sorbian language. But how does the church concretely influence the language life in the parishes? This paper presents some results of a field work conducted in a Sorbian Catholic parish to illustrate the sociolinguistic function of the local church. The general tendency among speakers of Sorbian to switch to German in the presence of (only-)german speakers minimalizes the usage of the sorbian language in the region, where Germans and Sorbs live togather. The church, on the other hand, tries not only to normalize the usage of Sorbian among Sorbs, but also actively attempts to integrate Germans into the Sorbian language sphere. Thus it is argued that the church, functioning as a counterpower to the assimilating tendencies, shows even traits of a “reversing language shift”.