THE GUERNSEY DIALECT AND ITS PLANT 



NAMES. 



BY MR. E. D. MARQUAND, 



Associate of the Linnean Society of London, and Memhre Correspondant 

 de la Soci4te des Sciences Naturelles et MatMinatiques de Cherbourg . 



The old Norman language which is still spoken in the 

 Channel Islands deserves more study than it has yet received, 

 because in all its main features it is the same that was used by 

 the cultured classes of England as far back as eight centuries 

 ago. In these sunny isles may be heard to-day the tongue 

 which was spoken by the people of our mother-country under 

 the early Norman kings, Avhich Mr. J. Linwood Pitts has 

 picturesquely described in his book on the Patois Poems of 

 the Channel Islands as " the speech alike of court and camp, 

 of trouvere and chronicler ; the tongue in which William the 

 Norman asserted his claims to the sovereignty, and Taillefer, 

 the Jongleur, carolled forth his defiance of King Harold, as he 

 heralded the onslaught at Senlac." 



It is quite a common mistake to suppose, as many people 

 have done, that this curious unwritten dialect — which differs 

 considerably in the various islands, both as regards pronuncia- 

 tion and vocabulary — is sim])ly a distorted or corrupt form of 

 modern French. Instead of being so, it is in reality very 

 much older than classical French, for it is a survival of the 

 language which was introduced into England at the time of 

 the Norman Conquest, and which for some centuries after- 

 wards continued to be the language of the English Court and 

 the English nobility. 



That this venerable language is rapidly dying out at the 

 present time in every one of the Channel Islands is beyond 

 question. In Alderney it will certainly have become extinct 

 in a very few years, for in proportion to its size, more English 

 is spoken there than in any of the other islands. In Guernsey 

 it will probably linger on for a generation or two, but hardly 

 more ; because, even in the country parishes, the children as a 

 rule do not habitually speak to each other in French, and they 



