Abstract languages: Upper Sorbian, English and German
In my autoethnographic project ryć / rěč (2025), I draw on the phonetic proximity of the Upper Sorbian words ryć (dig!) and rěč (speak!) to describe the embodied process of relearning Upper Sorbian (serbski jazyk). Digging and speaking become one gesture: I imagine my tongue as a spade cutting through sedimented histories of silence, shame, and loss. In my family, Sorbian was actively unlearned by my grandmother—yet her decision must be understood within a broader history of repression and devaluation in the German majority context. Nineteenth-century accounts document how for example teachers “waged war” on Sorbian language and dress, forcibly removing girls’ traditional bonnets in schools, producing ruptures that extended across generations.
My family history is further marked by extraction. The village of Šiboj, birthplace of my great-grandmother, was destroyed by coal mining; today Lake Šiboj covers its remains. I was born in the year the site was excavated. Building a paddle shaped like a tongue, I move across the lake as a performative act of return, asking what can be recovered from submerged ground.
Linguistic and geographic migrations—between Upper and Lower Lusatia and Dresden—produced hybrid forms of speech in my family. Becoming Sorbian again thus appears not as a return to an origin, but as a negotiation of layered identities. Within a sorbian/wendish queer feminist collective, I understand this process as a queering of belonging: creating space to question patriarchal traditions, to name gaps, and to embrace the Sorbian/Wendish minority as a plurality within itself.