English is widely understood throughout the city, but don’t expect Berliners to be as competent in it as the Dutch or Scandinavians. Turkish is the most common language in Berlin after German, particularly in the districts of Kreuzberg, Neukölln, and Wedding, where immigrant Gastarbeiter (guest workers) settled in the 1960s and 1970s. If you head out into south-east Brandenburg near the Polish border you will see bilingual signs in German and the dying Slavic language Sorbian, known as Wendish, which is spoken by the tiny ethnic minority that has lived there for centuries.