Upper and Lower Sorbian are two closely related Slavonic languages from the Western branch (including also Czech, Kashubian, Polish, and Slovak) spoken by estimately 55,000 people in Lusatia, a historical region in today Germany. Their situation is very hard since the younger Sorbian generation speaks almost exclusively German. This makes the languages close to extinction...
Here are some maps:
A map of West Slavonic languages
Upper Sorbian is H and Lower Serbian is H2
Sorbian-speaking region on the map of Germany
A better view on Lusatia. Upper Sorbian is spoken by about 40-50 thousand people in areas around the city of Budyšin, while Lower Sorbian by about 5-15 thousand people in areas around Chośebuz.
Very interesting map of the Sorbian dialect continuum. It shows that the linguistic situation is not as simple as Upper and Lower Sorbian, with intermediate dialects which don’t fit into one or another. Of course the most important are the Budyšin dialect (on which the literary Upper Sorbian is based) and the Choćebuz dialect (on which the literary Lower Sorbian is based).
Some resources (mostly taken from the external links on Wikipedia):
Hornjoserbšćina (Upper Sorbian)
- Upper Sorbian Grammar — a good grammar introduction
- Kurs serbskeje rěče — contains nice and easy dialogues
- University of Leipzig resources: ‘professional terminology’ and ‘language practice’
- German-Sorbian dictionary
- Lexicon for Sorbian kids
- Upper Sorbian Wikipedia
- Upper Sorbian Wikisource - ~170 Sorbian texts
- Serbske Nowiny - a website of a Budyšin-based newspaper
- Serbski Institut - a website of the Sorbian Institute
Dolnoserbšćina (Lower Sorbian)
- Vocabulary list
- Website about Lower Sorbian with a corpus and a dictionary: in German, in Lower Sorbian
- Lower Sorbian Wikipedia