Although the Channel Islands have been united politically with Great Britain since 1204, each of the four largest islands, Jersey, Guernsey, Sark and Alderney, feature Norman dialects, known locally as Jèrriais, Guernésiais, Sercquiais and Aurignais. For many centuries, these were the main everyday languages of most islanders, and Jèrriais and Guernésiais enjoy a literary tradition dating back to the nineteenth century. Owing to the spread of English throughout the archipelago during the twentieth century in particular, the dialects have all suffered a sharp decline in speaker numbers, with the Norman of Alderney now extinct. The insular varieties are not homogeneous and the linguistic consequences, both lexical and structural, of the extensive language contact between English and the three surviving dialects have served to further differentiate insular Norman from the Norman varieties spoken in mainland Normandy. The realisation that insular Norman is declining rapidly in terms of speaker numbers has prompted the establishment of local language planning measures, currently more established in Jersey than on the other islands.

It did not take long for Molière’s plays to travel across the Channel, but the forms in which they appeared on the early modern English stage and page were varied. The first translations of the 1660s were marked by a hybridising tendency in which one or more Molière plots were absorbed into composite plays, thereby satisfying the English taste for dramatic variety. Although this trend dwindled in favour of single-play translations, the hybridising approach was not abandoned altogether – comedy-ballets, as compound forms, were still blended. Even where single plays were translated, it was common for extra characters and small subplots to be added. But what one hand giveth the other taketh away: rhyme was, at this time, described as ‘an effeminate practice’ and, except for Dryden’s Amphitryon, was largely eschewed for its unnaturalness. Early translations of Molière were occasionally undertaken by women; Aphra Behn and Susanna Centlivre took up the medical satires and their work reveals that translation could be used to explore gender-based power imbalances. In the early eighteenth century, there was a notable drive towards preserving Molière’s plays in monumental collected editions, but these were seen as a complement to continued translation experimentation.

The chapter focuses on education as a social variable. It critically reviews classical approaches and suggests news ways of integrating education as a variable in sociolinguistic research in Arabic. These approaches are illustrated by examples from qualitative and quatitative studies.