Jersey's culture: a Norman language taught to newcomers' children

How Jersey's census counted its own language

The 2001 census asked every resident which language they mainly spoke and which they spoke as a second language, and it listed Jèrriais separately under the name Jersey French. The answer set the island's own language beside the languages of its newer residents:

The 2,874 speakers of Jèrriais in 2001 were 3.2% of the population. Two thirds of them were aged 60 or over, and the census report noted that the total was half the number recorded in 1989. Portuguese was spoken by 8.4% of residents that year, and 1,394 people, 1.6% of the population, spoke no English at all; more than three quarters of them spoke Portuguese as their main language.

French sits in the table as a second language: 17.3% of residents spoke it in 2001, and 14,776 of its 15,114 speakers used it alongside another main language. Slightly more than a quarter of the island, 27%, spoke more than one language.

The same census asked about cultural background. In 2001, 51.1% of residents described their background as Jersey, 34.8% as British and 6.4% as Portuguese or Madeiran. The share born in Jersey was 53% that year, against 52% a decade earlier and 72% in 1891.

A BBC report first published in 2023 put the number of native Jèrriais speakers at fewer than 500, most of them in their seventies and eighties. The 2001 census is the latest count of Jèrriais speakers among the sources listed here.

Why Jèrriais retreated from town to the parishes

Jèrriais is a variety of Norman, the language of the duchy Jersey belonged to before 1204, and until the nineteenth century it was the language of the island, while French was used for official business. The change in medieval England to writing in English was never taken up in Jersey, where Norman French continued in writing into the twentieth century.

The shift began in St Helier. English-speaking soldiers, retired officers and labourers arrived in numbers from the 1820s, and by 1840 there were 5,000 English residents. By 1841 the census found 11,338 people born elsewhere in the British Isles in a population of 47,544. In the early part of the century the town became mostly English-speaking, though bilingualism stayed common, and the result was a divided map: country people went on speaking Jèrriais, and many of them knew no English. English came to be described as "the language of commercial success and moral and intellectual achievement".

School carried the shift into the parishes. Elementary education became compulsory in 1899 and free in 1907, and from 1912 it was delivered in English only, following the curriculum and perspective of England. In the BBC's 2023 account, a man who grew up in St Ouen described starting school in 1944 without a word of English, in a class of children in the same position, and being punished for speaking Jèrriais in the classroom through the 1940s and 1950s. His father, Frank Le Maistre, compiled the dictionary of the language published in 1972.

During the occupation of 1940 to 1945 the language had a use. The BBC records that islanders used Jèrriais to pass messages the German forces could not follow, and that articles in Jèrriais printed early in the occupation advised readers to speak it so that "certain people" would not understand. Censorship stopped the articles, and the language went on carrying messages for the rest of the war. After 1945 the decline sped up. Within a generation most schoolchildren knew only a few words, and by the 1980s and 1990s the language had almost left everyday use.

The dialects added a further difficulty. Before good roads, most islanders rarely left their own parish, and Jèrriais differs from parish to parish in sound and, less often, in vocabulary, with the sharpest contrast between west and east. On an island of 118 square kilometres there was never one spoken form to teach.

How the government took over the language's revival

How Jèrriais became an official language

L'Office du Jèrriais was formed in 1999. The first Jèrriais Plan, for 2017 to 2019, was presented to the States on 16 June 2017, and in 2019 an amendment in the States Assembly made Jèrriais an official language of the States alongside English and French. It was the first time the island's government had given the language that status. A related proposition placed a duty on the public sector to promote Jèrriais, which is why it now appears on government letterheads, on signs and on the cards States members carry.

The Government Plan for 2020 to 2023 funded a Jèrriais teaching service of up to seven staff. Classes run in schools from nursery through to secondary, and adult lessons run at every level. The first plan also produced Jèrriais translations of three children's books, which the government said in 2022 had been distributed to more than 3,000 children.

What the language strategy set out

The Jèrriais Language Strategy for 2022 to 2025 organised the work under five themes: acquisition, use, status, corpus and planning. It set out an early-years programme, a place for the language in the Jersey Curriculum, a learning app, research towards a qualification at GCSE level, and an agreed standard written form to be settled by a Jèrriais Language Academy. It also committed the government to seeking ratification of the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in respect of Jèrriais, so that later governments would be bound to keep supporting it.

The strategy described the language as endangered, and its own foreword was written by a minister who said he had never been able to speak it.

Who the learners are

The strategy recorded that a large share of the children choosing Jèrriais lessons were of Polish and Portuguese heritage. The language of the Norman farming parishes is being learned in school by the children of families who arrived from Madeira and Poland, in a population where, by the 2021 census, about half the residents had been born in Jersey.

Standardising the language has meant choosing one parish's form. The BBC reported that modern teaching follows the St Ouen form, the variety with the most speakers, and that the choice was controversial because the other parish forms will go with their last speakers. The strategy's answer is recording: audio and video of native speakers, an online dictionary and a documentary film.

Where French still holds its ceremonial place

French and Jèrriais are separate languages in Jersey, and French has the longer official history. It was the original language of the States. At the start of each States meeting the Greffier calls the roll of members in order of seniority and they answer in French, and the Dean then leads prayers in French. Members may speak English, French or Jèrriais in debate, though most business is now conducted in English. Jersey sits in the Assemblée Parlementaire de la Francophonie, the body for parliaments with French as an official language.

The local vocabulary of government keeps French words. The principal officer of each parish is the constable, also called by the French title Connétable, and a Law passed by the States is called a Loi in French. Soldiers who arrived with the Puritan governor appointed in 1651 could not follow church services, because they were held in the local French.

French also came to Jersey as a language of exile. Protestant refugees arrived from the sixteenth century onwards, and Calvinism took hold under Elizabeth I. After the failed revolution of 1848, thirty-nine French revolutionaries were exiled to the island. Victor Hugo arrived in 1852, and exiles who died there were buried in the Macpela cemetery at Sion, in St John.

What Jersey writes and sings in its own language

The written record opens in the twelfth century with Wace, born in Jersey, who wrote the Roman de Brut and the Roman de Rou. He is counted as the founder of Jersey literature, though his language differs a great deal from modern Jèrriais. Printing reached the island in the eighteenth century, and Matthew Le Geyt was the first poet to publish in Jèrriais after it did. Philippe Le Sueur Mourant wrote in the language in the nineteenth century, and George d'la Forge, who lived most of his life in America, wrote in it from there; his work was collected in books in the 1980s.

Because Jèrriais had no official status for most of that time, it also had no standard spelling, and Jersey literature is written in several forms of Jèrriais alongside English and French. L'Office du Jèrriais dates its continuous body of literature to the late eighteenth century.

Music survives thinly. Fieldwork has recorded folk songs from the Channel Islands, mostly in French, and one, the Chanson de Peirson, belongs to Jersey alone. The revival has produced new bands. Badlabecques, a group of ten, had its first two albums taken into the British Library catalogue in 2020. The band Sonneux has revived the veil'ye, an evening of songs, music and stories that every village once held before radio and television.

The Jersey Eisteddfod was founded before the First World War by the Dean of Jersey, Samuel Falle, and it divides into performing arts and creative arts, from dance and music to needlework and photography. Its Jèrriais section added two classes in 2018, in drama and choral singing, and for two years running the St Ouen parish hall was full for them.

The visual record reaches much further back. Stone plaquettes with abstract designs made by the Magdalenians in the Upper Palaeolithic have been found on the island. Edmund Blampied, known for etching and drypoint, designed the banknotes Jersey issued during the occupation. René Lalique made the glass windows of St Matthew's Church, and the artists Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, both born in France, settled and died in Jersey.

Which days Jersey keeps as its own

Liberation Day, 9 May, is the island's national day. It marks the arrival of British troops on HMS Beagle on 9 May 1945, the day after the German forces in Europe surrendered.

The Battle of Flowers, a carnival of floral floats, has been held every August since 1902, when the first one marked the coronation of Edward VII. The Branchage film festival has run since 2008, and a summer run of music festivals fills the weeks from mid-June to late September.

The festivals held in Jèrriais are newer. The first annual Fête du Jèrriais took place in September 2018. L'Office du Jèrriais also keeps La Faîs'sie d'Cidre for cider-making, La Faîs'sie d'Nièr Beurre for the making of black butter, which it calls an old Jersey custom, La Fête dé Noué at Christmas, a Norman festival of stories and songs shared with the mainland, and La Folle d'Avoût, which recalls the Corn Riots of 28 September 1769. Conversation groups meet weekly in cafés in St Martin, St Helier and St Ouen.

What Jersey cooks from its dairy and orchards

Jersey milk is rich, and cream and butter carry much of the island's cooking. Jersey Royal potatoes, grown on the steep south-facing fields called côtils and once fertilised with seaweed, the vraic, are eaten boiled with butter or, when no longer new, fried in it. From the shore come mussels, called moules, oysters, lobster, spider crabs, conger and the ormer, a shellfish gathered at the lowest tides.

Apples were grown for cider from the end of the sixteenth century, when islanders enclosed their land to plant orchards and turned farming towards a cash crop. Cider went on being exported into the nineteenth century, and in 1795 orchards covered 20% of the island. By 1983 eight farms were still making cider for their own use. Production has since been expanded again, alongside apple brandy, and in 2013 the first commercial vodkas distilled from Jersey Royal potatoes went on sale.

The dishes carry Jèrriais names. Black butter, lé nièr beurre, is a dark spiced spread cooked from apples, cider and spices. Bean crock, les pais au fou, is a slow-cooked bean stew. Jersey wonders, les mèrvelles, are fried dough, and bourdélots are apple dumplings. Cabbage loaf, fliottes, nettle soup, called ortchie, and vraic buns complete the list. RECIPESpec is the sibling catalogue for the recipes themselves.

Who else Jersey's culture now includes

Jersey's identity has been pulled between Normandy and Britain for most of its history. Islanders did not generally call themselves English before the Union, and wars with France, including invasions of the island, turned loyalty towards Britain; by the early nineteenth century most identified as British. The occupation, and English-only schooling before it, weakened the Norman side further.

The next arrivals came from further off. The tourist trade after the war recruited seasonal staff in Madeira, and by the 2021 census 8% of residents had been born in continental Portugal or Madeira. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Poland has become the next source of workers. The toad, crapaud in Jèrriais, is found nowhere else in the British Isles, and its name has long been used for islanders themselves.

Religion follows the English pattern. The established church is the Church of England, with twelve parish churches, one at the centre of each parish, and the island moved from the Diocese of Winchester to the Diocese of Salisbury in November 2022. In a survey in 2015, 54% of adults said they had a religion, and 39% said they had none. Methodism was brought in 1774 by fishermen returning from Newfoundland, and when John Wesley preached on the island in August 1789 his words were interpreted into the vernacular for listeners from the country parishes.