"How are you?"
(How are you?) Asks a teacher to her students.
"
I'm
charming"
(I'm fine), answers a little girl.
On the Anglo-Norman island of Jersey, the Jersey people are resisting the hegemony of the English.
After having dialogued in this language derived from Norman French, the young students of the Beaulieu Convent School of Saint-Hélier rehearse a traditional dance, dressed in checkered aprons and scarves reminiscent of the local folk costume.
Then they listen to a legend told in Jersey by a teacher, hat with feathers on his head, with lots of gestures to help children understand.
"The language is in danger of disappearing"
On the island, which belongs to the British crown but is independent from the United Kingdom, schools have integrated the Jersey language, or
"Jèrriais"
in the original language, in their curricula in 2020. They thus teach children a language that is only a handful of the 100,000 inhabitants of this Channel island, still practicing.
"The number of native speakers is dropping below 800 and that means that the language is in danger of disappearing, (...) so we are working very hard to revitalize it"
, explains Susan Parker, one of the seven teachers. of Jersey from the island. According to the last register of 2012, 1% of the inhabitants affirmed to master it but
"one loses speakers among the elderly more quickly than one gains with the young people"
, regrets the linguist Geraint Jennings.
François Le Maistre, 84, recognizes that he belongs to
“the last generation”
of native speakers.
"It's very sad to lose the very essence of your culture," he
says over tea and cakes in a cozy living room overlooking a perfectly maintained garden, in the small village of Saint Ouen.
As children,
"we didn't talk about anything else at home,"
he recalls.
From now on, like almost all the inhabitants of this small tax haven located between France and England, François Le Maistre speaks mainly in English, a language that imposed itself when in the mid-1940s, Jersey abandoned agriculture to turn to tourism and trade with the United Kingdom.
"Jersey was considered a peasant language"
, which did not deserve to be preserved, explains his brother Jean, 77 years old.
A primary school that teaches Jersey language
The teachers severely punished the children who used it.
But the situation has changed a lot.
The year 2019 is proclaimed by the United Nations
"International Year of Indigenous Languages"
.
The Jersey government then added Jersey to the list of official languages, alongside English and French.
A decision which gave a boost to the teaching of this language in this Anglo-Norman island.
The government thus followed the model of the Isle of Man, also dependent on the British crown, whose original Celtic language, Manx, was declared extinct in 1974.
“With a strong investment, a lot of time and effort, (the authorities of Man) have revived it and today there is a primary school where children learn using this language (...). But they started 40 years ago and there is still a long way to go, ”
says Susan Parker.
For Atticus Mawby, a 21-year-old student,
“if the Jerseyman dies, Jersey will become just one more piece of the UK and that would be terribly sad”
.
So to bring the heritage of the island to life, the young man recently registered for the conversation workshops that Geraint Jennings organizes, five days a week, at different places on the island.
Stimulate the practice of young people through social networks
Mondays are devoted to the world of commerce.
"We want people to say to themselves (...):" I want there to be inscriptions in Jersey on my products or in my store ""
, explains the linguist, showing the banknotes of the local pound, printed in the three official languages. But for now, the streets lined with pastel-fronted Victorian mansions have far more inscriptions in French, the language in which Jersey laws have been written for centuries, than in Jersey. No media uses this language, with the exception of five minutes per week on BBC radio.
"It would help if there were movies,"
suggests Atticus Mawby. Geraint Jennings thinks that
"the best way to reach young people is through social networks"
because
“they want things on demand: they wonder how to say something, look for it on the internet and watch a video”
.
New challenges are emerging: finding equivalents of modern terms such as
“social networks”
in a language from the past.
