Abstract
In Guernsey (Channel Islands) there is a distinct lack of fluent new speakers of the indigenous language, Giernesiei. Examination of debates and unstated ideologies surrounding language teaching and revitalisation reveals that there is a degree of unwillingness to share the language, since effective learning of Giernesiei might undermine traditional speakers’ language ‘ownership’. This chapter relates these two facets of the mismatch between ideologies and practices, and discusses possible reasons and solutions. The idealised ‘traditionalist’ perception of Giernesiei conflicts with the unexpectedly rich and complex variation (both dialectal and diachronic) revealed by our documentary research. We present a taxonomy of reactions to variation in Giernesiei, which confirms and extends the findings of Jaffe in Corsica (Language Ecologies and the Meaning of Diversity: Corsican Bilingual Education and the Concept of ‘Polynomie’. In A. Creese, P. Martin & N. H. Hornberger (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Education (2nd ed., Vol. IX: Ecology of Language, pp. 225–236). Berlin: Springer, 2008).
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Notes
- 1.
As Giernesiei is not standardised, there is no standard spelling. ‘Progressive Learner Spelling’ (Marquis and Sallabank 2017) is a proposal intended to aid learners and new speakers by systematic phonemic representations which make pronunciation more transparent than so-called ‘traditional’ orthographies, which tend to be inconsistent and to use French-style spelling conventions which are opaque to Anglophones.
- 2.
One positive development is that one of the youngest native speakers has a small child who is being raised in both English and Giernesiei.
- 3.
A traditional apple cake.
- 4.
- 5.
See http://language.gg/article/115903/Speed-Patois and www.youtube.com/watch?v=iLrmcSBcCuA (accessed 4 August 2015).
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Sallabank, J., Marquis, Y. (2018). ‘We Don’t Say It Like That’: Language Ownership and (De)Legitimising the New Speaker. In: Smith-Christmas, C., Ó Murchadha, N., Hornsby, M., Moriarty, M. (eds) New Speakers of Minority Languages. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57558-6_4
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