Already upon arrival at the airport on the island of Jersey, in 2021, the welcome message arouses some curiosity:
"Seyiz les beinv'nus à Jerri".
It is neither English nor French, but
Jerseyese,
the traditional language that, during the Nazi occupation, served as a
"secret language"
for the inhabitants of that autonomous territory of the English Channel.
Despite being a dependency of the British Crown and speaking mainly in English, the French coast of Normandy is only 22 kilometers away, so it is not surprising that Jerseyese is precisely
a dialect of Normandy.
Few people, mainly elderly, still speak it fluently:
only 1% of the island's just over 100,000 inhabitants
do so, while another 25% understand the most common phrases.
Nazi troops on the streets of Jersey.
To reverse the situation and avoid its loss, the Government of Jersey declared it an
official language
in 2019 , along with French and English, in turn starting a promotion campaign in education, administrations and even to indicate the values of its tickets.
"Sonne les clioches, les p'tites clioches, sonne les clioches d'hivé!"
The chorus of the popular carol "Jingle Bells" resonates in Jerseyese in a classroom at the Jersey College for Girls, in Saint Helier, the island's capital, where 8 and 9-year-old students follow the instructions of their teacher, Susan Parker.
She is
one of the seven teachers
who go from school to school to teach the subject of traditional language and culture, a new pilot program in primary education that has already reached a dozen centers and more than 500 students.
Jersey street during the German occupation.
"At the beginning we always ask if they have any relatives or friends who speak Jerseyese and usually there are always three or four in each class who say yes, their grandmother or grandfather speaks it," explains Parker.
And he boasts that, precisely, one of his students had been able to understand the Christmas card that his grandmother had given him, written in Jerseyese.
"She said
'Bouan Noué'
and now she knows that means 'Merry Christmas', so she was very happy," she says with a smile.
"Secret language" during Nazi occupation
Born in 1937, François Lemaistre lived through the Second World War and the German occupation when he was a child, between 1940 and 1945, a period during which this Romance language became an escape valve
from Nazi surveillance.
A German bunker in Jersey.
"During those five years,
everyone spoke Jerseyese
simply because, unfortunately for the Germans, it was not possible for them to understand our language," Lemaistre says sardonically, in an interview at his home in Saint Peter, in the west of the island.
In fact, it was difficult "even for those who
spoke French
", due to the heritage of the language of the Viking peoples who occupied northern France, leaving words foreign to Latin, such as "hougue" to refer to mountain ("haugr" in Old Norse).
According to politician and linguist Geraint Jennings, the same "secret language" that challenged collaborationist French interpreters was also a victim of "the great social disruption" that the Occupation entailed, when many families were evacuated to England and their children were schooled there.
The statue of the liberation of Jersey in 1945.
Added to this fact is that "many men left Jersey at the start of the Second World War to join the British Armed Forces and spent the entire war and military career
speaking in English
."
Both factors undermined the cultural and linguistic roots of the younger generations, while English became a symbol of modernity with the complicity of tourism and the financial sector, engines of Jersey's new economy.
The word that captivated Victor Hugo
The discredit of being the
"peasants' language"
meant that Jerseyese was already discredited during the childhood of Lemaistre himself, who even in the schoolyard was forced to speak in English "at the risk of receiving a slap" if he did not. toward.
"And the sad thing is that my first primary school teacher was Jerseyese and she spoke Jerseyese, but she forbade it," he laments.
What perhaps his teachers did not know is that one of the most eminent names in universal literature, Victor Hugo (1802-1885), had learned the word
"pieuvre"
(octopus) during his exile in Jersey and, far from despising it, Thus he named the octopus antagonist of the work "The Workers of the Sea" (1866).
A view of the island today.
In this way, thanks to the success of the novel, he managed to introduce that word into contemporary French compared to its synonym "poulpe."
Although Lemaistre could not learn to write Jerseyese in the classroom, he did learn it from his father, Frank Lemaistre, who researched the origin of the words to standardize their spelling and produce the first Jerseyese-French encyclopedic dictionary, which the octogenarian
still treasures. in his bedroom
.
EFE Agency.
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GML