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24 - Contact between English and Norman in the Channel Islands

from Part Five - Contact and Language Structures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Mari C. Jones
Edited by
Salikoko Mufwene  and
Anna Maria Escobar
Salikoko Mufwene
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
Anna Maria Escobar
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

The sociolinguistic situation of the Channel Islands has meant that English has been spoken there alongside the native language, Norman, for several centuries, albeit in a diglossic relationship, with English assuming “High” functions (administration, legislation, education, media, and so forth) and Norman “Low” functions (familiar discourse with family and friends). The fact that, today, all speakers of the three extant varieties of Insular Norman (Jèrriais, Guernesiais, and Sercquiais) are also fluent in English has had far-reaching linguistic consequences in that the Norman spoken in the Channel Islands has diverged from the varieties spoken on the French mainland, and distinctive local varieties of Channel Island English have developed. Based on original data, this chapter provides an overview of the sociolinguistic setting that gave rise to this language contact and discusses some representative examples of contact-induced influence in the lexis, phonology, and morphosyntax of both Channel Island Norman and Channel Island English.

Keywords

GuernseyJerseySarkChannel IslandsEnglishNormanlanguage contactborrowinglexisphonologymorphosyntaxlanguage obsolescencelanguage planninglanguage revitalizationurban contact dialectsmultilingual mixed languagescontact-induced changecontact-facilitated changestandard language ideologymonolingual habitusethnicity
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Language Contact
Volume 2: Multilingualism in Population Structure
 , pp. 635 - 654
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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