Evaluating linguistic variation in light of sparse data in the case of Sorbian

The severely endangered Sorbian languages (ISO hsb, dsb), endemic to the Eastern part of Germany, are dramatically under-researched. This lack of research extends from basic knowledge about numbers of speakers, competence, and language transmission, but includes also core aspects of linguistics, like phonology, morphology and syntax. Having experienced centuries of marginalisation, Sorbian texts are (sparsely) attested only from the 16th century. This makes evaluation of variation especially difficult, since the variation might be caused by a certain register of the language, for example, a special dialect (our default assumption), but it might also be caused by other factors such as traditions of verbal art, notably in folksongs which unfortunately have not been preserved in their original form either and are therefore hard to evaluate, but which contain very old layers of language. In this chapter, one of the oldest Sorbian monuments will be compared to folksongs, applying knowledge about neighbouring Germanic and Celtic literatures. From the linguistic side, the results of the comparison lend greater insights into historical sound changes in Sorbian; from the cultural side, we learn about aesthetic concerns of verbal art in this language, which, in turn shed light on a range of linguistic phenomena beyond sound patterns