The New 'Series Minor' from the Sorbian Institute

0. Since the year 1992, the Serbian Institute in Bautzen/ Budysin has published a series of monographs (Schriften/Spisy) with at present close to 40 volumes. These are for the most part original and carefully researched investigations of between 112 and 527 pages in the areas of Serbian history, literature, language, culture, art, society, religion, education, and politics. Also included in this "Series Maior" (our designation-the Latin maior and minor seem more adequate translations than English large, small and major, minor, respectively, of Sorbian wulki and maty) is the Sorbische Bibliographie/Serbska bibliografija, which appears every five years (for an overview of the bibliography up to the year 1995, see our review in CSP 42 [2000]: 385-86); a conference volume; and a selection of reprinted papers.Five years ago, the Institute published the first two volumes in a "Series Minor" (Upper Sorbian Maty rjad; Lower Sorbian Maty red; German Kleine Reihe). Since then five more of these slim volumes have appeared in print.1 Actually, both the title "Series Minor" and the consecutive numbering of the volumes appear for the first time in the fifth volume; this lack of a subtitle and volume numbering will no doubt present some problems for librarians and bibliographers (the Institute's website gives the general title Kleine Reihe des Sorbischen Instituts/Ma!y rjad Serbskeho instituta and also numbers the volumes consecutively; see www.serbskiinstitut.de/si.publm.html).As opposed to the "Series Maior", i.e., the monograph series described above, the "Series Minor" is obviously meant to be published quickly and is addressed to topical issues in contemporary Sorbian life, presents documentation, and, as in Nr. 7, makes available a master's thesis. However, it must be said that this philosophy is never stated overtly by the publisher, i.e., the Sorbian Institute. We must thus await future issues or an explicit editorial philosophy to determine whether our presupposition is correct. Four volumes are devoted to the area of language maintenance, revitalization, and politics (vols. 1, 2, 4, 6); one volume to linguistic analysis (Nr. 7); and one volume each deals with church history (vol. 3) and the reminiscences of a Sorbian Stasi victim (vol. 5), respectively.1. It seems quite appropriate that the "Series Minor" should start out with the publication of workshop papers concerning the major problem facing minority language policy makers in Europe today, viz., that of maintaining and/or further developing such languages (vol. 1). The six sections in this volume deal with Sorbian (both Lower and Upper); Scots Gaelic; Welsh; Saami; Basque; and Romansh. The workshop was held in April, 1999, at the Sorbian Institute in Bautzen/Budysin, a city of some 40,000 inhabitants in Upper Lusatia in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. The city itself cannot boast of more than 8% Upper Sorbian speakers and it is in fact located in what is now generally considered a peripheral area of Upper Sorbian with little hope of language survival beyond the present generation. As Leos Satava points out in his lead paper, it is only in the Western, i.e., the Catholic, part of the Upper Sorbian language area that "the situation is quite favourable so far since 'the baton' is still being passed on in the sphere of ethnic consciousness and intergenerational language transmission" (15).Satava's conclusion is borne out by Ludwig Ela's paper on Sorbian in which the latter states that one cannot really speak of a revitalization policy for this language group (except for the project "Witaj") since the attention of language of policy makers concentrates on "Bestandschutz" and "Bestandspflege" (which basically means "protecting and preserving what there is"). "Witaj" (Lower/Upper Sorbian for "welcome") is a project that foresees the establishment of Sorbian kindergartens and thus eventually of schools and has indeed succeeded in regaining some lost linguistic territory in the Lower Sorbian area (21). …