Jersey Languages: Difference between revisions

|Country=Jersey

|Name=Jersey

|Type=Topic

|Topic Type=Background

|Background=Languages

Jersey has been multilingual throughout its history. Nowadays, most business is conducted through the medium of English, which is the first language of most of the inhabitants; historically, i.e. up until the 20th century, this would have been in various forms of Norman French. There is also a substantial difference between the legal French used in Jersey, and the local spoken dialect known as Jèrriais. Records may, however, be difficult to read because of unique local words, Latin words, or different handwriting styles.

 

Jèrriais was never the language of the Royal Court; documentation from there (and subsequently from the States) was always written in Jersey Legal French. Equally the business of the church (and later the chapels) was done in French. But for most of the latter part of the 19th and early 20th century, most people in rural Jersey were trilingual or at least triglossic - English was the language of commerce, Legal French the language of church and law, and Jèrriais the language that did for everything else.

 

 

 

 

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Historically, the local spoken language in Jersey was Jèrriais. This is still alive, and is sometimes referred to as "patois", although some consider this name disparaging. This is best understood as the Jersey branch (or branches) of the wider Norman language; the branches spoken in Guernsey, Sark and Alderney are recognisably of similar origin but differ considerably in detail.<br>  

There is a considerable corpus of written Jèrriais, including over 900 articles written for the ''Jersey Evening Post'' by George Le Feuvre (who wrote as ''George d'La Forge''), and proceedings of ''L'Assembliée d'Jèrriais'', a group founded in 1952 which gathered speakers of the language from across the island.<br>  

The rise of the school certificate and broadcast media changed this, and Jèrriais was largely squeezed out (although it had a brief renaissance during the Occupation, as the German forces could not understand what was being said!). Thanks to the efforts first of L'Assembliée d'Jèrriais and subsequently of L'Office du Jèrriais, the language has not yet become extinct, and it is thought that several thousand local inhabitants can speak at least a minumum amount of Jèrriais, with thousands more able to recognise it and gist its meaning. However, the number of people who are first-language speakers continues to decline, and is now believed to be barely above one hundred.<br>  

The vast majority of immigrants were agricultural labourers who had left Brittany and western Normandy in search of better wages and working conditions. By working hard they began to acquire property and became farmers employing labourers rather than hired men and women, and naturally some of these were French also (it was noted many years ago - by a Jerseyman - that the French were prepared to work for each other, but the Jerseyman was only prepared to work for himself). At its peak, between 1890 and 1914, the French-born population numbered about one in ten.<br>  

French is no longer the island's second language. When Britain joined the EEC (as it then was) in 1973 the traditional benefits in employing French contract labour disappeared. The gap was filled largely by Portuguese nationals escaping the last years of the Salazar dictatorship. Most came from Madeira, at that time an impoverished province neglected by the authorities. It is now thought that about one tenth of the population of Jersey is of Portuguese origin.<br>  

 

[[Category:Jersey|Language and Languages]] [[Category:Language and Handwriting]]<br>