Generally, this contact situation can be characterized by increasing Germanization. The last Sorbian tribes lost their political independence at the beginning of the 11th century (1003), followed by a long process of establishing German-ruled territories. There was a small class of German rulers whereas the great majority (about 90%) of the rural population was Sorbian. Since the 12th century the colonization of the Sorbian-speaking territory was forced by an increasing settlement of German farmers, craftsmen and merchants. This process – in combination with further Christian missionary activity and often with economic and technical superiority of the newcomers – generally led to a stepwise assimilation of the Sorbian population and therefore to a shrinking of their language territory. Another consequence of this process was a broader and much more intensive language contact leading to an increasing number of German borrowings in Sorbian, mainly since the 14th and 15th century. Intensive borrowing from German into Lower Sorbian was also caused by the Reformation since 1517. An important factor in this process was the formation of a Lower Sorbian literary language, which was closely connected with the Reformation. Mainly in the second half of the 19th century a non-religious literary language evolved. The only weekly newspaper (since 1848) clearly shows the efforts to handle the necessary opening of the language to new topics. Correspondingly we find a great amount of loanwords, some of them new for sure, others probably already known in the dialects, but registered for the first time. Most of the texts in this newspaper were written by the editors, who were bilingual, but mainly German-educated pastors and schoolmasters. In the first decades of this newspaper there is a clear dominance of German with respect to lexical innovations (loanwords or loan translations).