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:
“It further said, “The inhabitants of Sandwich generally manifest a fond and steady adherence to the manners, employments and modes of living which characterized their fathers,” which made me think that they were, after all, very much like the rest of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There were three classes of inhabitants who either frequent or inhabit the country which we had now entered: first, the loggers, who, for a part of the year, the winter and spring, are far the most numerous, but in the summer, except for a few explorers for timber, completely desert it; second, the few settlers I have named, the only permanent inhabitants, who live on the verge of it, and help raise supplies for the former; third, the hunters, mostly Indians, who range over it in their season.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“While the very inhabitants of New England were thus fabling about the country a hundred miles inland, which was a terra incognita to them,... Champlain, the first Governor of Canada,... had already gone to war against the Iroquois in their forest forts, and penetrated to the Great Lakes and wintered there, before a Pilgrim had heard of New England.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)