Wendish, a name whose unfamiliarity is easily explained by the fact that this interesting language is to-day spoken by only 150,000 people, living in Prussia and Saxony. These people call themselves Serbjo, Serske, and their language Serbska reč, for which there is no exact English equivalent. They are the fragmentary remnants of two large Slavonic tribes, the Serby and Lužyczanie, who were settled in the ninth century, the former between the Saal (Solyava) and the Elbe (Laba), the latter between the Elbe and the Oder in what is now Southern Brandenburg, Eastern Saxony, and Western Silesia. Related to them were other tribes, but as their names have become extinct it would be unnecessarily confusing to mention them here.
The name Lužyczanie or Lužane, has survived in the German designation of that piece of territory Lausitz, and in the English Lusatia. The name Lužyczanie, which means ' dwellers in the water-meadows ', aptly indicates the nature of the country this people inhabited. In their last stronghold, the Spreewald, to-day, the only means of communication between one village and another is often by boat over the thousand ramifications of that torpid river. The name Wendish, which occurs in the English designation Lusatian-Wendish, is merely the German Windisch or Wendisch, the term by which all Germans have from time immemorial designated all Slavs, now more especially applied to the Lusatian Wends. The word is ubiquitous as a place-name wherever the Germans and Slavs have been in contact, and is even at the present day used to designate more than one Slavonic nationality. It is simplest for us to follow the German lead and call these people the Lusatian Wends, though it must not be forgotten that they call themselves and all other Slavs call them Serbs, and even the Germans sometimes call them Sorben, and their language Sorbisch. This is, of course, only a variation of the name of the well-known Southern Slav race, the Servians or Serbs, and is one of the many facts reminiscent of the essential pre-historic affinity of
