Guernsey's culture: three languages and the one it is losing

Why the States were asked to fund Guernésiais

The Committee for Education, Sport and Culture wrote to the States of Deliberation on 25 June 2020, and its first paragraph set out the position. Guernésiais is the indigenous language of Guernsey, it is critically endangered, and the number of fluent speakers had fallen so far that it "could cease to be spoken at all within a few years". The committee proposed a Guernsey Language Commission with a mandate "to sustain, develop and promote Guernésiais as a unique aspect of the island's culture, heritage and identity", and asked for grants of up to £100,000 in each of 2021, 2022 and 2023 as seed money. The existing budget for developing the language stood at £26,000 in 2020.

The letter set conditions on its own proposal. The Commission was to run for an initial three years and then be reviewed. If the community, given every opportunity, declined to take the language up, the letter said the States would "need to face up to the reality that there is insufficient appetite in Guernsey to continue investing in the indigenous language". A vote against the grant would be taken as "a definitive judgement" that the States did not wish to spend further time and money on it.

The letter also listed what had already been tried. Since the decline was recognised in the 1950s the island had tried a Language Support Officer, night school classes, lessons outside school hours, conversation groups and a Guernsey French Eisteddfod. A "shadow" commission formed in 2012 lost momentum after its first few years, and the letter names the two reasons given: no money on a sustainable footing, and no government backing. Few learners, it judged, had got past beginner level.

The committee asked for the letter to be debated on 19 August 2020, and in August 2020 Guernésiais and French were recognised as official languages of Guernsey. The Commission now offers adult lessons, a "Speed Patois" evening for speakers at every level, a "Pure Patois" gathering for those able to talk for a long stretch without falling back on English, a free translation service for short texts and recorded lessons online. Guernsey Museums states that the language is taught in no school as a timetabled subject; some schools hold lunchtime or after-school sessions, usually run by volunteers.

How three languages divided Guernsey by class

The policy letter traces a Romance language on the island across nearly 2,000 years. When King John lost the Duchy of Normandy to Philippe II of France in 1204 and kept the Channel Islands, no attempt was made at once to bring in English law or the English language, and Guernésiais remained the everyday speech of most islanders well into the nineteenth century. Many people in the rural parishes born before the Second World War spoke only Guernésiais and learned English at school or in England after evacuation.

It was never the only language on the island. The Guernsey Language Commission's account gives each language its own users. The Royal Court and its officials used standard French from the medieval period to the early twentieth century, and so did the merchants and the better-off families of St Peter Port. The schools, when they were founded, taught standard French and called it "the Good French". English arrived with the soldiers stationed on the island and with the British who came to live or work in town. In the parishes people went on speaking Guernésiais into the middle of the twentieth century.

The dates of the shift are legal ones. The States of Guernsey adopted English for ordinary business in 1926. Deeds for the sale and purchase of real estate on the island were written in French up to 1971. Government and court proceedings are now conducted in English.

Guernésiais itself is a variety of Norman. Guernsey Museums answers the claim, still heard on the island, that it is a corrupted form of French: it calls the language a cousin of standard French and older than it, with vocabulary, word order and sounds that carry a Norse inheritance mixed with everyday Latin and some Celtic influence. Place names keep the Norse layer. A hougue is a hill, from the Norse, and vraic is the island word for a seaweed. The speech also differs within Guernsey, where words and pronunciations in the north of the island can differ from those in the west, and Jersey, Sark and Alderney each developed a Norman of their own.

Who wrote Guernésiais down

Guernésiais is mainly a spoken language and it has no standard spelling, so its name alone appears as Guernésiais, Giernesiais and Dguernesiais. The policy letter of 2020 asked the new Commission to "embrace and research the differing views" on its spelling, pronunciation and grammar. It still has a written literature, and much of it dates from the nineteenth century.

Georges Métivier (1790 to 1881) wrote several volumes of poetry in Guernésiais and compiled a dictionary of the language, published in 1870. Guernsey Museums prints a stanza of his poem La Victime with a translation:

Veis-tu l's écllaers, os-tu l'tounère? / Lé vent érage et la née a tché!

In the museum's English the speaker asks whether the lightning is seen and the thunder heard, while the wind rages and the snow has fallen; the stanza ends with a plea to open the door.

The poet Denys Corbet (1826 to 1909) was among the small group of writers who shared his aim of keeping the language alive, and his house in the parish of Forest now carries a blue plaque. Thomas Martin (1839 to 1921) devoted his life to translating into Guernésiais, and the policy letter credits him with a Bible, all of Shakespeare's plays and many of the plays of Longfellow, Molière, Pierre and Thomas Corneille and Voltaire. According to the same letter, the Norman writing of the Channel Islands in that century is usually credited with prompting a revival of Norman literature across the water on the Cherbourg peninsula.

The twentieth century added dictionaries and a smaller number of writers. Marie De Garis researched and published a dictionary of Guernésiais and English in 1967, reprinted in a fourth edition in 2012. Marjorie Ozanne, Hazel Tomlinson and Hélier d'Rocquôine wrote in the language, and the Wikipedia culture article adds Tam Lenfestey and T. H. Mahy. The Commission's recent output runs to children's material: an activity book called Warro!, a counting sheet and a reading of The Gruffalo in Guernésiais.

What the evacuation did to the island's speech

Anglicisation had begun in the nineteenth century, carried by better trade links and more regular transport to the British mainland. The German occupation accelerated it sharply. Most of the island's schoolchildren were evacuated to England in 1940 and spent close to five years there, and adults who left with them or served in the forces lived in English for the same period. The policy letter makes a narrower point as well: the words parents use with infants were not used for five years, and they dropped out of what one generation passed to the next.

For the years after 1945 the letter lists the growth of tourism, English on radio and television, a school system modelled closely on the UK's Butler Act of 1944, and marriages between islanders and people born elsewhere. The Guernsey census of April 2001 is the last formal count, and it shows how far the change had gone.

The last three rows are the Commission's own reading of the census, and it concludes from them that someone born elsewhere in Europe in 2001 was slightly more likely to understand some Guernésiais than someone born on Guernsey.

The estimates since then are informal and they vary. Guernsey Museums put the number able to speak the language fluently at under 200 in May 2020. The policy letter of June 2020 gave between 50 and 200 native speakers, many over 80 and very few proficient speakers under 60. The two sources also classify the danger differently: the letter cites UNESCO's grade of "severely endangered", and the Commission's page describes the language as "Endangered".

Who wrote books on Guernsey in French and English

The island's printed literature follows the same three languages, and much of what is read about Guernsey abroad was written by people who came from elsewhere.

Victor Hugo arrived on Guernsey on 31 October 1855, in exile from France, and lived there until 1870. He wrote some of his best known work there, Les Misérables among it, and in 1866 published Les Travailleurs de la mer, a novel set on Guernsey and dedicated to it. His house in St Peter Port, Hauteville House, is a museum run by the City of Paris, and the French consulate on the island is based there. The painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir spent the late summer of 1883 on Guernsey and painted fifteen pictures, every one of them of the bay and beach at Moulin Huet on the south coast.

Some of the reference books of English were written on the island. Henry Watson Fowler moved to the island in 1903, and he and his brother Francis George Fowler wrote The King's English, the Concise Oxford Dictionary and much of Modern English Usage there, on an island where many people in the rural parishes still spoke Guernésiais.

The novel written from inside is The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G. B. Edwards, published in 1981, which gives an account of twentieth-century island life; a blue plaque was put up in September 2008 on the house on Braye Road where Edwards grew up. Elizabeth Goudge, whose mother was from Guernsey, drew on her mother's stories for Island Magic in 1934 and Green Dolphin Country in 1944. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, is set during the occupation and was made into a film released in 2018.

How Calvinism and Methodism quietened island music

Each of the ten parishes on Guernsey has a parish church dating from the eleventh century. Religious authority lay first with the French Catholic church and, for the last 500 years, with the English church, and the parishes' Church of England churches moved to the See of Canterbury in 2014, leaving the Bishopric of Winchester. Britannica records no official religion. The Reformation reached Guernsey from Normandy, through Calvinist reformers in the mid-sixteenth century, and the later spread of Methodism suppressed dancing and secular music.

Some of the music survived that. A number of traditional songs and dances were recorded, and some dances were collected on the island in the nineteenth century. La Bébée, a novelty dance of that century also known as the Baby Polka, remains popular with costumed folklore groups in several parts of Europe. Folk songs such as Jean, Gros Jean and J'ai perdu ma faumme have survived. Edith Carey wrote in 1903 that the chifournie had disappeared from Guernsey by the middle of the nineteenth century.

The groups that perform now tie the music back to the language. La Guaine du Vouêt and Les Dànsaeurs dé L'Assembllaïe D'Guernésiais appear at events such as the Viaer Marchi, the annual festival where bean jar is served, and the Commission publishes songs and Christmas carols in Guernésiais. The composer John Ireland lived on Guernsey for a time.

What Guernsey keeps as emblems and cooks

The island's emblems are mostly animals. The Guernsey cow is the one known abroad, kept for rich creamy milk and for butter with a distinctive yellow colour, and more and more raised for beef. Fewer islanders have kept cattle for their own supply since the 1960s, though steers still graze on L'Ancresse Common from time to time. The donkey, âne, is the island's other animal, explained by the steep streets of St Peter Port that needed pack animals and by a claim to stubbornness. Jersey people call Guernsey people ânes, and Guernsey calls them back crapauds, toads.

The Golden Guernsey goat, with its golden coat, came close to extinction through crossbreeding by the end of the Second World War. Its survival is credited largely to one breeder, Miriam Milbourne, who hid her herd from the Germans during the occupation, and the Rare Breeds Survival Trust still keeps the breed on its watchlist. The Guernsey lily, Nerine sarniensis, takes its species name from Sarnia, the Latin name of the island, although the plant was brought from South Africa. "Sarnia Cherie" is played as the island's anthem on occasions that need one of its own.

Bean jar is a stew of haricot and butter beans with pork and shin of beef. Guernsey gâche, pronounced "gosh", is a bread made with raisins, sultanas and mixed peel, and gâche mélée is spiced chopped apple set in a sponge. Conger soup, spider crab, mussels and lobster come from the sea around the island. The ormer, Haliotis tuberculata, a kind of abalone, is harvested from the beaches at low spring tides under strict laws.

How Guernsey measured land and money

The island kept units of its own, and its coinage shows how closely Guernsey was tied to France.

The Guernsey unit of land is the vergée. A vergée, vergie in Guernésiais, is 17,640 square feet, or 1,639 square metres, and is made of 40 Guernsey perches, each perch a square 21 feet on a side. The Guernsey pound in weight was two ounces heavier than the English pound.

Money followed the franc. From 1830 to 1956 Guernsey issued coins of 1, 2, 4 and 8 doubles, the double being worth one eightieth of a French franc and eight doubles making a Guernsey penny. Twelve Guernsey pence made a Guernsey shilling and twenty shillings a Guernsey pound, both different from their English namesakes. An ordinance of 1848 set sterling as legal tender at £1 1s 3d Guernsey, which is 2,040 doubles, and British coins were made legal tender in 1870, the British shilling passing at 12½ Guernsey pence. Banknotes of 1914 carried values in Guernsey shillings and in francs. After 1921 eight doubles made a penny, and that penny was the same as an English one.

How Liberation Day and the Muratti mark the year

The date the island keeps above all others is 9 May. On that day in 1945 the German flags came down across Guernsey after five years of occupation, British officers came ashore, and thousands of islanders crowded into St Peter Port to celebrate. Liberation Day is now a national holiday across the Channel Islands, with large celebrations every year. The occupation itself is covered in Guernsey: history.

Sport keeps up the rivalry with Jersey, and Guernsey teams play in green, the island's traditional colour. The Muratti, a football match between the Channel Islands, has been played since 1905, and rugby teams from the two islands have competed for the Siam Cup since 1920. Guernsey F.C. joined the English league system in the 2011 to 2012 season, and Guernsey RFC plays in English rugby leagues.

Beyond the Channel, Guernsey enters the Commonwealth Games in its own right, as it has since 1970. It won its first medals in 1982 and its first gold in 1990. It hosted the Island Games in 1987, 2003 and 2023. Where Guernsey has no team of its own and the Home Nations compete separately, an islander may choose any one of them: the footballer Matt Le Tissier could have played for Scotland or Wales and chose England.