Renata Bura

National stereotypes, as with any stereotype, are a simplified representation of the external world. These simplified images find their reflection and are preserved in the language, in words, metaphors, proverbs, and phraseology. In Upper Sorbian paremiology a self-stereotype of the Sorb is found, a man who primarily sees himself in a positive light, as good, honest, devoted and faithful. A “true” Sorb is also hospitable and pious. The most important component of the sense of identity is, however, the linguistic distinctiveness, which is stressed in the proverbs and expressions. The self-evaluation is formulated against a clear stereotype of the German, who is treated as a “foreigner”, as well as a symbol of oppression. This stems from the common history and the co-existence of the two nations. However, the image of the German emerging from the Upper Sorbian proverbs is not exclusively negative. There is no ethnocentrism in the Sorbs’ self-stereotype as, despite stressing their own positive traits, they are objective and have a critical attitude towards their own vices. A clearly negative feature of the Sorbs, which appears regularly in the collected material, is the imitation of German customs. In order to describe such representatives of the Sorbian nation a pejorative ethnonym Němpula is used.

The Sorbian Seminary came into being in Prague at the beginning of the 18th century to educate Catholic clergymen. In 1846, the students at the Seminary founded the Serbowka association and began to keep journals as well as produce the handwritten Kwětki almanac. These two sources were used as the basis for an analysis of the language – to be more precise, of the lexicon – used by the members of the association. Pful’s dictionary, published in 1866, served as a point of reference for an analysis of the data collected.
The juxtaposition of the language material gathered in the study enables us to observe a great degree of conformity between the lexis used by the Serbowka members and the vocabulary recorded by Pful.
What is more, in the yearbooks of the Serbowka and in Pful’s dictionary we can notice a large proportion of loanwords from the Czech language, both older and more recent. This is connected with the attitude at that time towards the renascent language. In the lexicon of the Serbowka members the proportion of bohemisms (or interference from the Czech language) is much greater, which is a result of direct and close contact with the Czech language.