Today marks the celebration of the 22nd annual International Language Day, a yearly event held to promote the preservation and protection of languages around the world. In honor of International Mother Language Day, we are introducing a new language to the ever-growing list of Translator languages—welcome Upper Sorbian!

Adding Upper Sorbian to Translator was made possible by the Sorbian language community, in particular the Foundation for the Sorbian People, the Witaj Language Center and the Sorbian Institute which donated data to create the new language system. You can now translate between Upper Sorbian and any of the more than 100 languages and dialects in the Microsoft Translator apps, Office, and Translator for Bing. Using Azure Cognitive Services Translator you can add Upper Sorbian text and document translation to your apps, websites, workflows and tools. You can also use Translator with Cognitive Services such as Speech or Computer Vision to add additional capabilities such as speech-to-text and image translation into your apps.

International Mother Language Day and language preservation

February 21st was declared as International Mother Language Day in 1999 by UNESCO to “to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world.” It has been celebrated annually since 2000. The date of February 21st was chosen to commemorate the 1952 Bengali language movement advocating for recognition of the Bengali language in modern day Bangladesh. The theme of this year’s International Mother Language Day is “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities”. Learn more about International Mother Language Day.

True to the spirit of International Mother Language Day, the Translator team has worked tirelessly to preserve indigenous and endangered languages around the globe. We have teamed with language communities to add languages such as Yucatec Maya, Māori, and Inuktitut. Advancements in machine translation technology, most notably multi-lingual models, have made it possible to create high quality language systems with smaller amounts of training data making it possible for even more language communities to take advantage of machine translation as a tool for language preservation. The language data the Upper Sorbian language community provided was instrumental in introducing the language to Translator.

If your language community is interested in partnering with Microsoft to add your language to Translator, and you have access to digital documents in your language and another commonly spoken language, please contact us using this form.

About Upper Sorbian

Upper Sorbian is a Slavic language spoken by about 25,000 people in the East German region known as Lusatia, where it is recognized as an official second language. Upper Lusatia, the southern hilly part of the region where Upper Sorbian is spoken is located in the modern German state of Saxony. The city of Bautzen is considered the center of Upper Sorbian language and culture.

Upper Sorbian is grouped in the West Slavic language branch along with Czech, Polish, and Slovak. Itis protected as a minority language within Germany.

Here are some useful phrases in Upper Sorbian:

English	Upper Sorbian
How are you?	Kak so ći wjedźe?
What is your name?	Kak ty rěkaš?
My name is…	Moje mjeno je…

Learn more about Upper Sorbian on Bing.

What you can do with Microsoft Translator

At home
Translate real-time conversations, menus and street signs, websites, documents, and more using the Microsoft Translator app for iOS and Android.  Learn more

At work
Globalize your business and customer interactions with customizable text and document translation using Azure Cognitive Services Translator.  Learn more

In the classroom
Create a more inclusive classroom for both students and parents with live captioning and cross-language understanding.  Learn more