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, also known as , Sarkese or Sark-French, is the Norman dialect of the
Channel Island The Channel Islands ( nrf, Îles d'la Manche; french: îles Anglo-Normandes or ''îles de la Manche'') are an archipelago in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They include two Crown Dependencies: the Bailiwick of Jersey, ...
of
Sark Sark (french: link=no, Sercq, ; Sercquiais: or ) is a part of the Channel Islands in the southwestern English Channel, off the coast of Normandy, France. It is a royal fief, which forms part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, with its own set of ...
(
Bailiwick of Guernsey The Bailiwick of Guernsey (french: Bailliage de Guernesey; Guernésiais: ''Bailliage dé Guernési'') is an island country off the coast of France as one of the three Crown Dependencies. Separated from the Duchy of Normandy by and under t ...
). Sercquiais is a descendant of the 16th century
Jèrriais (french: Jersiais, also known as the Jersey Language, Jersey French and Jersey Norman French in English) is a Romance language and the traditional language of the Jersey people. It is a form of the Norman language spoken in Jersey, an island i ...
used by the original colonists, 40 families mostly from
Saint Ouen Audoin (AD 609 – on 24 August 684; also spelled ''Audoen'', ''Ouen'', ''Owen''; la, Audoenus; known as Dado to contemporaries) was a Frankish bishop, courtier, hagiographer and saint. Life Audoin came from a wealthy aristocratic Frankish fami ...
,
Jersey Jersey ( , ; nrf, Jèrri, label= Jèrriais ), officially the Bailiwick of Jersey (french: Bailliage de Jersey, links=no; Jèrriais: ), is an island country and self-governing Crown Dependency near the coast of north-west France. It is the ...
who settled the then uninhabited island, although influenced in the interim by Guernésiais (the dialect of
Guernsey Guernsey (; Guernésiais: ''Guernési''; french: Guernesey) is an island in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy that is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown Dependency. It is the second largest of the Channel Islands ...
). It is also closely related to the now-extinct Auregnais (
Alderney Alderney (; french: Aurigny ; Auregnais: ) is the northernmost of the inhabited Channel Islands. It is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown Dependencies, Crown dependency. It is long and wide. The island's area is , making i ...
) dialect, as well as to Continental Norman. It is still spoken by older inhabitants of the island and most of the local placenames are in Sercquiais. In former times, there may have been two subdialects of Sercquiais, but today the dialect is relatively homogeneous. The
phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
of the language retains features lost in Jèrriais since the 16th century.


Written Sercquiais

Relatively little Sercquiais has been transcribed, and as there is no widely accepted form, it has received a certain amount of stigma as a result. A notable ruler of
Sark Sark (french: link=no, Sercq, ; Sercquiais: or ) is a part of the Channel Islands in the southwestern English Channel, off the coast of Normandy, France. It is a royal fief, which forms part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, with its own set of ...
, Sibyl Hathaway, who was a speaker herself, proclaimed that it could "never be written down", and this perception has continued in the years since. The earliest published text in Sercquiais so far identified is the '' Parable of the Sower'' () from the
Gospel of Matthew The Gospel of Matthew), or simply Matthew. It is most commonly abbreviated as "Matt." is the first book of the New Testament of the Bible and one of the three synoptic Gospels. It tells how Israel's Messiah, Jesus, comes to his people and form ...
. Prince
Louis Lucien Bonaparte Louis Lucien Bonaparte (4 January 1813 – 3 November 1891) was a French philologist. The third son of Napoleon's second surviving brother, Lucien Bonaparte, he spent much of his life outside France for political reasons. After a brief political ...
, linguist, visited the Channel Islands in September 1862 in order to transcribe samples of the insular language varieties, which he subsequently published in 1863: Which in the NIV is translated as: : (3) " ..A farmer went out to sow his seed. : (4) As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. : (5) Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. : (6) But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. : (7) Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. : (8) Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. : (9) He who has ears, let him hear."


Present

By the year 2022 there are 3 native speakers. Czech linguist Martin Neudörfl is trying to preserve the language by encouraging children and teaching them Sarkese. Since 2019 the language has been taught in schools.


Phonology

:(Note: Sercquiais not possessing a standard
orthography An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language, including norms of spelling, hyphenation, capitalization, word breaks, emphasis, and punctuation. Most transnational languages in the modern period have a writing system, and ...
, examples are given according to Liddicoat's ''Lexicon of Sark Norman French'', Munich 2001) Sercquiais does not have the
voiced dental fricative The voiced dental fricative is a consonant sound used in some spoken languages. It is familiar to English-speakers as the ''th'' sound in ''father''. Its symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet is eth, or and was taken from the Old Engl ...
which is such a distinctive characteristic of St. Ouen in Jersey where most of the colonists came from. Palatalisation of velars and (see Joret line) is less fully developed in Sercquiais than in
Jèrriais (french: Jersiais, also known as the Jersey Language, Jersey French and Jersey Norman French in English) is a Romance language and the traditional language of the Jersey people. It is a form of the Norman language spoken in Jersey, an island i ...
. Palatalisation in Jèrriais of to and to has the equivalent in Sercquiais of and . For example, ''hiccup'' is in Jèrriais and in Sercquiais; ''war'' is respectively and . Palatalisation of in Jèrriais leads to , but in Sercquiais is generally retained: ''profession, trade'' in Sercquiais is , whereas Jèrriais has palatalised to . is retained in Sercquiais where Jèrriais has reduced to , as in ''to eat'': (Sercquiais) – (Jèrriais). Final consonants of masculine nouns in the singular are in free variation with null in all positions except in liaison. Final consonants are usually pronounced at ends of phrases. Final consonants are always lost in plural forms of masculine nouns. A ''cat'' may therefore be or in Sercquiais, but ''cats'' are . For comparison, Jèrriais is usually pronounced , and the plural has the long vowel as in Sercquiais. It can also therefore be seen that length is phonemic and may denote plurality. Sercquiais has also retained final consonants that have been entirely lost in Jèrriais, such as final in (''meadow'' – in Jèrriais as in French). Metathesis of is uncommon in Sercquiais, and in Jèrriais, by comparison with Guernésiais. The palatalised l, which in Jèrriais has been generally palatalised to in initial position and following a consonant, is maintained in Sercquiais.
Gemination In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from '' gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from ...
occurs regularly in verb conjugations and
gerund In linguistics, a gerund ( abbreviated ) is any of various nonfinite verb forms in various languages; most often, but not exclusively, one that functions as a noun. In English, it has the properties of both verb and noun, such as being modifiab ...
s, as in Jèrriais but in distinction to Guernésiais. However, Sercquiais does not geminate palatal fricatives, unlike Jèrriais: In the second half of the 19th century the language changed considerably. We can observe this in the 40
idiolect Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people ...
s that can be heard today. An important part of the language is the usage of
diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech ...
s, which affects the pronunciation. It is unclear how words are pronounced because there are many possible ways to pronounce them depending on where they are in the phrase. It is important to codify the language since not even the native speakers follow all the rules.


Conjugation of verbs

The St. Ouennais origins of Sercquiais can be seen in the 2nd and 3rd person plural forms of the
preterite The preterite or preterit (; abbreviated or ) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past; in some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple ...
. Sercquiais uses an ending ''-dr'' which is typical of the St. Ouennais dialect of Jèrriais, but generally not used elsewhere in Jersey (nor nowadays by younger speakers in St. Ouen).


See also

*
Norman language Norman or Norman French (, french: Normand, Guernésiais: , Jèrriais: ) is a Romance language which can be classified as one of the Oïl languages along with French, Picard and Walloon. The name "Norman French" is sometimes used to descri ...


Footnotes


References

* *
Société JersiaiseBailiwick Express. (2021). Unlikely hero saving the language of Sark.Mgr. Martin Neudörfl (2017), Spelling standardization of Sark-French, Prague


External links


Jèrriais and Sercquiais today
by Dr Mari C. Jones – from the BBC {{Gallo-Romance languages and dialects Norman language Sark Endangered Romance languages Languages of the Channel Islands