32 (aEllXSEY DIAI.E( r AXD PLAXT XA^fKS. 



Avill certainly not toacli it to tlieir children. It is in Jersey 

 that Norman French will sui'vive lono^est, owing^ partly to the 

 larger size of the island, partly to its proximity to France, 

 and partly also to the influx of French agricultiu-al labourers, 

 who si)end some montlis in tlie island each year during the 

 farmers' busy season. 



In view then of the rapid obsolescence of this extremely 

 interesting old language, in the only portion of His Majesty's 

 dominions in which it is still spoken as a ])nre vernacular, 

 it seems to me that some special effort should be made to 

 preserve its peculiarities in a more effectual manner than has 

 yet been done. 



Year by year the critical study of local dialects is 

 spreading further and further afield : and much is made 

 nowadays of the homely and ungrammatical speech of many 

 an out-of-the-Avay corner of England and Ireland, Scotland 

 and Wales. Therefore it behoves us, as a small community 

 of English men and women, who live on the confines of the 

 United Kingdom, to take a share in rescuing our insular 

 dialect from oblivion : those of us, at any rate, who are proud 

 of our Norman descent. For, small though they be, the 

 Channel Islands are among the very oldest and brightest 

 jewels in the British Crown : they are British possessions by 

 inheritance, and not by conquest. 



Although I speak of the insular vernacular as a dialect, 

 it would perhaps be more correct to call it a patois ; because 

 it is an unwritten tongue, in the sense that it possesses 

 no ancient local literature ; but the difficulty is to write it so 

 as to conv^ey to a stranger a correct idea of its peculiar 

 pronunciation. As regards the dialect of Jersey I cannot 

 express an opinion : but in the form spoken in Guernsey, 

 there are constantly recurring some very peculiar vowel- 

 sounds and combinations of consonants, which have no exact 

 parallel either in English or French, and consequently they 

 cannot be phonetically rendered 'in Avriting, without first 

 inventing some special system of notation. Some years ago 

 an American philologist spent many months in Guernsey 

 carefully studying the grammar, idiom, and pronunciation 

 of the local patois : and subsequently he published an 

 elaborate Memoir on the subject ; but in order to overcome 

 the difficulty of phonetically rendering the pronunciation, he 

 w^as obliged to construct such a complicated system of signs 

 and symbols, that the result is hardly intelligible to an 

 ordinary reader, however useful it may be to a critical student 

 of comparative philology. 



