Wends
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Wends. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a Slavic people related to the Poles and the Bohemians. They number about 120,000. Of these, one-tenth are Catholics, the remainder are chiefly Lutherans. They have quite a printed literature. They use the German alphabet in their publications. At one time they occupied a large district in eastern Germany, but they became surrounded by German people and were entirely cut off from their old Slavic neighbors. They now occupy a few isolated colonies and a territory of about 1,200 square miles in the upper valley of the Spree, islands, as it were, in the great sea of Germans. They still preserve their ancient language and customs, but they are Germanizing slowly. There is an ancient settlement of Wends, for instance, in the city of Halle. They are known as Hallorans. They retain their old customs and have a monopoly of making salt and of the undertaking business. Outside of their present settlements they have become assimilated with the German people, contributing the dark hair and features to be found so extensively in eastern Prussia and some parts of Saxony. See Halle ; Poland ; Slavs
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
the name of a section of the Slavonic race, now dwelling mostly in that part of Germany known as Lusatia, partly in Prussia, partly in the kingdom of Saxony. In the 6th century the Wends were a powerful people, extending along the Baltic, from the Elbe to the Vistula, and S. to the frontiers of Bohemia. They comprised a variety of tribes. The favorite occupation of the Wends was, and still is, agriculture. There are several dialects of the Wend language still extant.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The people Aiton's called Wends in 1910 are now usually called Sorbs, or Lusatian Sorbs, and they are Germany's only indigenous Slavic minority, recognised in law in both Saxony and Brandenburg. The slow Germanizing that Aiton's noted did not stay slow: the Nazi state banned Sorbian organisations and the Domowina in 1937, and after 1945 the East German government's open-cast lignite mines swallowed dozens of Sorbian villages in Lusatia. Where Aiton's counted about 120,000 Wends, estimates today put speakers at a few tens of thousands, with Upper Sorbian holding on in Catholic villages near Bautzen while Lower Sorbian, one of the "several dialects" Collier's mentioned in 1921, is classed as severely endangered. Sorbian is now printed in a Latin alphabet with its own diacritics rather than in the German type Aiton's described, and the label "Wend" survives mainly among the descendants of the emigrants who founded Serbin, Texas, in the 1850s.
Written for this edition, 2026.