The language of students at the Sorbian Seminary in Prague and the Prague Serbowka

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.