Inhabitants
Today approximately 780,000 people live in Upper Lusatia, nearly 157,000 of them in the Polish part to the east of the Neisse river. A part of the country belongs to the settlement area of the Sorbs. Between Kamenz, Bautzen and Hoyerswerda, about 20,000 people speak Sorbian. But also the German population is not culturally homogeneous, the cultural borders can be quite well identified by the different dialect groups. While in the region around Bautzen a pretty good High German is spoken, in the south the Upper Lusatian dialect (Oberlausitzisch), an old Franconian dialect, is common. In the east Silesian is still partially spoken. The greatest density of population can be found in the German-Polish twin city of Görlitz-Zgorzelec. Currently 91,000 inhabitants, 33,000 in the Polish part, live here.
In the German part of Upper Lusatia, the population declines since almost 20 years. Young people leave the region because the unemployment in Eastern Saxony is particularly high. This and the low birth rate lead to severe aging of the population. In the absence of available jobs only little influx of foreigners is noticeable. The Polish part of Upper lusatia is, apart from Zgorzelec, Lubań and Bogatynia, only sparsely populated. The area belongs to the structurally weak regions of Poland. Only the coal-fired power plant Turów offers a larger scale of industrial jobs.
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Famous quotes containing the word inhabitants:
“Do you know what Agelisas said, when he was asked why the great city of Lacedomonie was not girded with walls? Because, pointing out the inhabitants and citizens of the city, so expert in military discipline and so strong and well armed: “Here,” he said, “are the walls of the city,” meaning that there is no wall but of bones, and that towns and cities can have no more secure nor stronger wall than the virtue of their citizens and inhabitants.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)
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—Arnold Bennett (1867–1931)
“Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and rustics; that is selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense, with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and undissolved mass of peat.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)