forms. West Slavic contains all the Slavic languages which have died out over the
last two hundred years.
High levels of inter-comprehension are achieved between Czech and Slovak,
with Slovaks understanding Czech more readily than the Czechs Slovak, for
cultural and historical reasons. Comprehension between Sorbian and Polish,
Sorbian and Czech or Slovak, and Polish and Czech or Slovak, is less reliable.
And Kashubian (10.4.2.3) is not so readily understood by other speakers of Polish.
The West Slavic dialect area has not always been continuously Slavic, with former
German settlements between Poland and former Czechoslovakia, and between
Lusatia and Poland over many centuries, and Lusatia and Czechoslovakia, lessen-
ing the graded continuity of transitional dialects.
10.4.1 Dialects of Sorbian
Sorbian is surrounded by, and interspersed with, German. Although its eastern and
southern borders touch Poland and the Czech Republic, respectively, the Ore
Mountains form a natural barrier, and one cannot speak of transitional dialects
in the same sense as we can between, say, Czech and Slovak or Serbian and
Croatian. The most important dialect groups are internal to Sorbian. Some scho-
lars, like S
ˇ
ewc (1968), divide Sorbian into two dialect groups, based on Upper and
Lower Sorbian. Stone (1993a), however, following the work of the Sorbischer
Sprachatlas (1965–1996), has two groups of dialects with a transitional zone
between Upper and Lower Sorbian.
The question of whether Lower Sorbian is a language, a co-variant of Sorbian
together and on a par with Upper Sorbian, like the situation of Croatian and Serbian
in Serbo-Croatian, or a dialect of Sorbian where Upper Sorbian is the major variant,
is resolved differently depending on the criteria used. There is, however, consensus
that Lower Sorbian is not merely a dialect of Upper Sorbian. It is formally differ-
entiated from Upper Sorbian to a degree which would support some argument for
language-hood, rather like Kashubian vis-a
`
-vis Polish. It has standardized forms,
and adequate historicity. But it is lacking in vitality and prestige.
Since we treat Upper and Lower Sorbian in this book as co-variants of a single
language with two standard forms (2.4.2), and not as dialects, the main dialectal
interest lies in variation within each of these two standards, and the transitional dialect
area between them. In other words, we do not regard the distinction between Upper
and Lower Sorbian as a matter of dialectology, and we have devoted separate atten-
tion to both variants in the appropriate chapters on the formal properties of Slavic.
The small number of speakers of Sorbian, however, and the distance between the
written and spoken standards, have not helped the maintenance of the dialects, nor
10.4 West Slavic 527