Sercquiais
Encyclopedia
also known as Sarkese or Sark-French () is the Norman
dialect of the Channel Island
of Sark
. In the island it is sometimes known, slightly disparagingly, as the "patois
", a French term meaning "regional language
".
Sarkese is in fact a descendant of the 16th century Jèrriais
used by the original colonists, 40 families mostly from Saint Ouen
, Jersey
, who settled the then uninhabited island, although influenced in the interim by Dgèrnésiais
(Guernsey
dialect). It is still spoken by older inhabitants of the island. Although the lexis
is heavily anglicised, the phonology
retains features lost in Jèrriais since the 16th century. Most of the local placenames are in Sarkese. In former times, there may have been two subdialects of Sercquiais. http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/multilingual/jerriais.shtml#A
It has suffered greatly in recent years due to a large influx of tax exile
s from England
who have moved to the island, as well as official neglect.
It is also closely related to the extinct Auregnais
(Alderney
) dialect, as well as Continental Norman.
The earliest published text in Sercquiais so far identified is the Parable of the Sower
() from the Gospel of Matthew
. Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte
, 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 is such a distinctive characteristic of St. Ouen
in Jersey where most of the colonists came from.
Palatalisation of velar
s /k/ and /ɡ/ is less fully developed in Sercquiais than in Jèrriais. Palatalisation in Jèrriais of /k/ to [tʃ] and /ɡ/ to [dʒ] has the equivalent in Sercquiais of /kj/ and /ɡj/. For example hiccup is in Jèrriais and in Sercquiais; war is respectively and .
Palatalisation of /tj/ in Jèrriais leads to [tʃ], but in Sercquiais /t/ is generally retained: profession, trade in Sercquiais is , whereas Jèrriais has palatalised to .
[dʒ] is retained in Sercquiais where Jèrriais has reduced to [ʒ], 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 cat is usually pronounced /ka/, 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 /t/ in (meadow - in Jèrriais as in French).
Metathesis
of /r/ is uncommon in Sercquiais, and in Jèrriais, by comparison with Dgèrnésiais.
The palatalised l, which in Jèrriais has been generally palatalised to /j/ in initial position and following a consonant, is maintained in Sercquiais.
Gemination
occurs regularly in verb conjugations and gerund
s, as in Jèrriais but in distinction to Dgèrnésiais.
However, Sercquiais does not geminate palatal fricatives, unlike Jèrriais:
. 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).
Norman language
Norman is a Romance language and one of the Oïl languages. Norman can be classified as one of the northern Oïl languages along with Picard and Walloon...
dialect of the Channel Island
Channel Islands
The Channel Islands are an archipelago of British Crown Dependencies in the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. They include two separate bailiwicks: the Bailiwick of Guernsey and the Bailiwick of Jersey...
of Sark
Sark
Sark is a small island in the Channel Islands in southwestern English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. It is a royal fief, geographically located in the Channel Islands in the Bailiwick of Guernsey, with its own set of laws based on Norman law and its own parliament. It has a population...
. In the island it is sometimes known, slightly disparagingly, as the "patois
Patois
Patois is any language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. It can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects, and other forms of native or local speech, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant...
", a French term meaning "regional language
Regional language
A regional language is a language spoken in an area of a nation state, whether it be a small area, a federal state or province, or some wider area....
".
Sarkese is in fact a descendant of the 16th century Jèrriais
Jèrriais
Jèrriais is the form of the Norman language spoken in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, off the coast of France. It has been in decline over the past century as English has increasingly become the language of education, commerce and administration...
used by the original colonists, 40 families mostly from Saint Ouen
Saint Ouen, Jersey
-Cueillettes:Unlike the other parishes of Jersey, the subdivisions of this parish are not named vingtaines, but cueillettes . Vingteniers are still elected, however, in the cueillettes.*La Petite Cueillette*La Grande Cueillette...
, Jersey
Jersey
Jersey, officially the Bailiwick of Jersey is a British Crown Dependency off the coast of Normandy, France. As well as the island of Jersey itself, the bailiwick includes two groups of small islands that are no longer permanently inhabited, the Minquiers and Écréhous, and the Pierres de Lecq and...
, who settled the then uninhabited island, although influenced in the interim by Dgèrnésiais
Dgèrnésiais
Guernésiais, also known as Dgèrnésiais, Guernsey French, and Guernsey Norman French, is the variety of the Norman language spoken in Guernsey. It is sometimes known on the island by the semi-disparaging name "patois"...
(Guernsey
Guernsey
Guernsey, officially the Bailiwick of Guernsey is a British Crown dependency in the English Channel off the coast of Normandy.The Bailiwick, as a governing entity, embraces not only all 10 parishes on the Island of Guernsey, but also the islands of Herm, Jethou, Burhou, and Lihou and their islet...
dialect). It is still spoken by older inhabitants of the island. Although the lexis
Lexis
Lexis may refer to:*Lexis , the total bank of words and phrases of a particular language, the artifact of which is known as a lexicon*Lexis *Lexis.com, part of the LexisNexis online information database-People with the name:...
is heavily anglicised, the phonology
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
retains features lost in Jèrriais since the 16th century. Most of the local placenames are in Sarkese. In former times, there may have been two subdialects of Sercquiais. http://www.bbc.co.uk/voices/multilingual/jerriais.shtml#A
It has suffered greatly in recent years due to a large influx of tax exile
Tax exile
A tax exile is one who chooses to leave a country with a high tax burden and instead to reside in a foreign nation or jurisdiction which takes a lower portion of earnings. Going into tax exile is a means of tax mitigation or avoidance.-Legal status:...
s from England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
who have moved to the island, as well as official neglect.
It is also closely related to the extinct Auregnais
Auregnais
Auregnais, Aoeur'gnaeux or Aurignais is the Norman dialect of the Channel Island of Alderney . It is estimated that there are now possibly only 20 people still fluent in the language....
(Alderney
Alderney
Alderney is the most northerly of the Channel Islands. It is part of the Bailiwick of Guernsey, a British Crown dependency. It is long and wide. The area is , making it the third-largest island of the Channel Islands, and the second largest in the Bailiwick...
) dialect, as well as Continental Norman.
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 ruler of Sark, Dame Sibyl Hathaway, who was a speaker herself, claimed that it could "never be written down", and this myth has continued in the years since then.The earliest published text in Sercquiais so far identified is the Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Sower
The Parable of the Sower is one of the parables of Jesus found in three out of the four Canonical gospels and in the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas In this story, a sower dropped seed on the path, on rocky ground, and among thorns, and the seed was lost; but when seed fell on good earth, it...
() from the Gospel of Matthew
Gospel of Matthew
The Gospel According to Matthew is one of the four canonical gospels, one of the three synoptic gospels, and the first book of the New Testament. It tells of the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth...
. Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte
Louis Lucien Bonaparte
Louis Lucien Bonaparte was the third son of Napoleon's second surviving brother, Lucien Bonaparte. He was born at Thorngrove, mansion in Grimley, Worcestershire, England, where his family were temporarily interned after having been captured by the British en route to America A philologist and...
, linguist, visited the Channel Islands in September 1862 in order to transcribe samples of the insular language varieties, which he subsequently published in 1863:
- (S. Makyu. Chap. XIII. 3-9)
- ("A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop — a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown. He who has ears, let him hear." Gospel of St Matthew, NIVNew International VersionThe New International Version is an English translation of the Christian Bible. Published by Zondervan in the United States and by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK, it has become one of the most popular modern translations in history.-History:...
)
Phonology
Sercquiais does not have the voiced dental fricativeVoiced dental fricative
The voiced dental non-sibilant fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound, eth, is . The symbol was taken from the Old English letter eth, which could stand for either a voiced or unvoiced...
which is such a distinctive characteristic of St. Ouen
Saint Ouen, Jersey
-Cueillettes:Unlike the other parishes of Jersey, the subdivisions of this parish are not named vingtaines, but cueillettes . Vingteniers are still elected, however, in the cueillettes.*La Petite Cueillette*La Grande Cueillette...
in Jersey where most of the colonists came from.
| Sercquiais | Jèrriais | English | French |
|---|---|---|---|
| to read | lire | ||
| courage | courage | ||
| to iron | repasser |
Palatalisation of velar
Velar consonant
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the velum)....
s /k/ and /ɡ/ is less fully developed in Sercquiais than in Jèrriais. Palatalisation in Jèrriais of /k/ to [tʃ] and /ɡ/ to [dʒ] has the equivalent in Sercquiais of /kj/ and /ɡj/. For example hiccup is in Jèrriais and in Sercquiais; war is respectively and .
Palatalisation of /tj/ in Jèrriais leads to [tʃ], but in Sercquiais /t/ is generally retained: profession, trade in Sercquiais is , whereas Jèrriais has palatalised to .
[dʒ] is retained in Sercquiais where Jèrriais has reduced to [ʒ], 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
Liaison (linguistics)
Liaison is the pronunciation of a latent word-final consonant immediately before a following vowel sound. In French, most written word-final consonants are no longer pronounced and are known as latent or mute...
. 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 cat is usually pronounced /ka/, and the plural has the long vowel as in Sercquiais. It can also therefore be seen that length is phonemic
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
and may denote plurality.
Sercquiais has also retained final consonants that have been entirely lost in Jèrriais, such as final /t/ in (meadow - in Jèrriais as in French).
Metathesis
Metathesis (linguistics)
Metathesis is the re-arranging of sounds or syllables in a word, or of words in a sentence. Most commonly it refers to the switching of two or more contiguous sounds, known as adjacent metathesis or local metathesis:...
of /r/ is uncommon in Sercquiais, and in Jèrriais, by comparison with Dgèrnésiais.
| Sercquiais | Jèrriais | Dgèrnésiais | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| cross | |||
| Wednesday |
The palatalised l, which in Jèrriais has been generally palatalised to /j/ in initial position and following a consonant, is maintained in Sercquiais.
| Sercquiais | Jèrriais (li representing /j/) |
English |
|---|---|---|
| shoe polish (blacking) | ||
| patch | ||
| to place | ||
| roof |
Gemination
Gemination
In phonetics, gemination happens when a spoken consonant is pronounced for an audibly longer period of time than a short consonant. Gemination is distinct from stress and may appear independently of it....
occurs regularly in verb conjugations and gerund
Gerund
In linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....
s, as in Jèrriais but in distinction to Dgèrnésiais.
| Sercquiais | Jèrriais | Dgèrnésiais | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| masonry | |||
| I'll ask |
However, Sercquiais does not geminate palatal fricatives, unlike Jèrriais:
| Sercquiais | Jèrriais | English |
|---|---|---|
| brewery | ||
| armful | ||
| to eat | ||
| eating |
Conjugation of verbs
The St. Ouennais origins of Sercquiais can be seen in the 2nd and 3rd person plural forms of the preteritePreterite
The preterite is the grammatical tense expressing actions that took place or were completed in the past...
. 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).
| Sercquiais | Jèrriais (St. Ouennais) |
standard Jèrriais | English |
|---|---|---|---|
| they wanted | |||
| you spoke | |||
| they were | |||
| you took |
External links
- Lé Sèrtchais (including comparative glossary)
- Jèrriais and Sercquiais today by Dr Mari C. Jones - from the BBCBBCThe British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...