‘Pour nos êfants et nos pathents au l’yain’: Jèrriais as a world language in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
George d’la Forge once wrote regarding the success of Jersey people abroad that ‘les viers Jèrriais pouvaient lus déhaler au liain aussi bein comme size eux’. ‘Les viers Jèrriais, et la langue Jèrriaise étout’, one might add! Jèrriais is of course Jersey’s own language, and Jèrriais writing provides an intimate reflection of Island life in areas such as agriculture, politics, or social change. But Jersey has of course always had connections beyond its own shores, sandwiched between France and England with varying links to both, global connections through maritime trade, cod fishing and the British empire, and important flows of migration both to and from the Island. This talk will discuss writers big and small from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and take in locations from Cherbourg to Chicago to explore how Jèrriais has been entangled with Jersey’s global ties. It will look both close to home in the form of links with the ‘cousins’ of mainland Normandy, and further afield in the travels of Jersey people across the world and the importance that the language could have for emigrants far away from their ‘vier Jèrri’, as well as the influence that this had on the position of Jèrriais in the Island itself.
