The Sorbs - a German minority

According to this article in The Economist this week, the Sorbs are one of four recognised miinorities in Germany and receive money to keep their culture going.

For the record, there are about 60,000 of them, they have been in Brandenburg and Saxonyalong the River Spree in Upper and Lower Lusatia. for 1400 years and they speak their own Slavic based language. Actually irs two language, upper and lower Sorbian.

Sorbian culture receives over 8million Euros to keep the culture alive, but they are not happy as that amount is slowly being reduced.
But its still more than the other three minorities get. The Danes get a mer 300,000 a year.

For the record the two other minorities are Friesians and the Roma.

Stanislaw Tillich is the leader of the CDU in Saxony and was elected Minister-President in May this year.

He is a sorb.

It could be argued though that the Danes do not need money to "keep their culture alive", since it happily exists just across the border.

The sorbs however only exist in Germany.

As for the Roma, sorta a bit more - that one includes Roma and Sinti.

Pikey's have a culture now?

The Sorbs were recognised as a minority in the DDR back then.
The German states also recognises Friesens, Roma and ethnic danish Schleswig-Holsteiners.
The latter have their own party in S-H that tends to ally with the SPD and after the last elections up there, the CDu so rallied against ethnic Danes that the Danish government called the German representitive in Copenahgen in for a "discussion".

The open question then is, why doesn#t the German state recognise other minorities?

The four officially recognised minorities differ from other minorities by their status as ethnic groups with German nationality and a language of their own and by being autochthonous, i.e. having a century-long history of living here. See statement of the Ministry of the Interior. The Danish minority in Germany obviously isn't threatened culturally by the majority, since they have the backing by the neighboring country, and the language is not at all in danger. The Friesen and the Sorbs, however, both are estimated at about 60,000 people. The transmission of the idiom from one generation to the next which worked for centuries wouldn't be assured nowadays without extra assistance and – also financial – help.

I don't know if the 8 million € of funds for the Sorbs are too much – after all, it creates jobs and is additional support for not exactly thriving regions. It might actually be a good strategy to help strengthen the attachment of people to this region and slow down migration of young people to the western Bundesländer.

The "Economist" article mentions that the Roma only get 1,6 million €. That is indeed a remarkable discrepancy. I guess this might have to do with the fact that the Sorbs are represented more efficiently (by the Domowina), maybe also with the DDR tradition, when they were promoted for the price of political loyality. Preserving the mainly oral culture of the Roma, who are fragmented in subgroups, is probably also much more difficult.

BTW, in German there is a distinction between Roma and Sinti. The latter have been living in Germany for about 600 years. In the 19th century, Roma groups arrived from South East Europe, and then recently more, mostly due to the Balkan wars. Some Sinti seem to insist on the difference between them and Roma, they also have their own organisation. See Sinti und Roma. In my 1st class in elementary school in a small Franconian town, there were two Sinti siblings. They were later sent to the Sonderschule, because classes were large, and they didn't get the necessary extra assistance. I googled for one of the class mates, and found someone with the name who is a scrap metal dealer – that is probably him.

There is another group of traditionally itinerant people in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, with a slang of their own (not a language like Romanes/Romani) – the Jenische. They are comparable to Travellers, Tinkers or "Pikeys", I guess.