Jèrriais
For 1,000 years Jersey has had a language of its own. Known to anglophones as Jersey Norman-French and to its speakers as Jerriais, it is sometimes dismissed as a patois or debased version of ‘real’ French.
Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. Jèrriais is more ancient than either modern French or the English in which this article is written.
Linguists will tell you that Jerriais is a Romance language, that it is derived from the langue d’oil, that it is of western Norman origin and that it is full of words of Norse derivation.
Historians will tell you that it is quite close to the language of William the Conqueror and of the poet Maistre Wace, the Jersey-born author of ‘Roman de Rou’.
Self-styled realists, meanwhile, will tell you that Jerriais is dying and that only a handful of 2,000 people speak it with any degree of fluency.
All these points of view miss the real point – which is that Jerriais is first and foremost a vivid means of verbal communication replete with sayings and proverbs and firmly rooted in traditional Jersey life.
During this century pressures ranging from immigration to the Occupation and from mass media of communication to tourism have forced Jerriais on to the back foot and into the depths of the country parishes.
Recently, however, it has experienced a resurgence, thanks largely to enthusiastic speakers who want others to taste the pleasures of self-expression in a language which is rich enough to have 25 separate words – from brulée to tournéoualipe – for a physical blow.
In addition, the language is once more present in schools – not as the suppressed speech of the playground but as part of the curriculum.
Any mention of Jerriais must, of course, take into account the work of Dr Frank Le Maistre, whose mammoth dictionary and other written works represent scholarship of the highest order. His role in perpetuating what he would doubtless describe as his native tongue cannot be exaggerated.
It is to be hoped that the latest generation of parlers, such as Geraint Jennings and Tony Scott-Warren, are successful in their efforts to keep the language alive.
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