page_title: Lusatia
section_title: Sorbs
hierarchical_section_title: Lusatia / Demographics / Sorbs
caption_attribution_description: English: Train station at Baršć in Lusatia on the Polish border Polski: Stacja kolejowa w Baršć na Łużycach na granicy z Polską
context_page_description: Lusatia, also known as Sorbia, is a historical region in Central Europe, split between Germany and Poland. The region is the home of the ethnic group of Sorbs. It stretches from the Bóbr and Kwisa rivers in the east to the Pulsnitz and Black Elster in the west, today located within the German states of Saxony and Brandenburg as well as in the Lower Silesian and Lubusz voivodeships of western Poland.
  Historically, Lusatia belonged to several countries. Being part of the Lands of the Bohemian Crown for three hundred years, alongside them it passed to the Habsburg Monarchy and from it to the Electorate of Saxony. The greater part passed to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1815 and the whole region merged into Germany in 1871. After the occupation of Eastern Germany by the Red Army and the partition in 1945, the eastern part of Lusatia along the Lusatian Neisse river was ceded to Poland under the Potsdam Agreement. The newly-established Polish-German border became known as the Oder–Neisse line.
  In the Polish part today, as the result of the expulsion of its German-speaking population after 1945 and Polish re-settlement, Polish is spoken, and in the German part German.
context_section_description: More than 60,000 of the Sorbian Slavic minority continue to live in the region. Historically, their ancestors are West-Slavic-speaking tribes such as the Milceni, who settled in the region between the Elbe and the Saale. Many still speak their language (though numbers are dwindling and especially Lower Sorbian is considered endangered), and road signs are usually bilingual. However, the number of all the inhabitants of this part of eastern Saxony is declining rapidly - by 20% in the last 10 to 15 years. Sorbs make efforts to protect their traditional culture manifested in the traditional folk costumes and the style of village houses. The coal industry in the region (like the Schwarze Pumpe power station needing vast areas of land) destroyed dozens of Lusatian villages in the past and threatens some of them even now. The Sorbian language is taught at many primary and some secondary schools and at two universities (Leipzig and Prague). Project "Witaj" ("welcome!") is a project of eight preschools where Sorbian is currently the main language for a few hundred Lusatian children.
  There is a daily newspaper in the Sorbian language (Serbske Nowiny); a Sorbian radio station (Serbski Rozhłós) uses local frequencies of two otherwise German-speaking radio stations for several hours a day. There are very limited programmes on television (once a month) in Sorbian on two regional television stations (RBB and MDR TV).
caption: Bilingual station of Forst (Lausitz)
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