Indigenous language documentation in Guernsey, Channel Islands

Julia Sallabank, SOAS

Project Details:

Small Grant. Duration: 2009-2010. £10,000

Project Summary:

There are probably 2-300 (mainly elderly) fluent speakers of Dgernesiais, the indigenous language of Guernsey, Channel Islands, which is categorized by the 2009 UNESCO Atlas as ‘severely endangered’. Due to former negative ideologies (which contributed to endangerment) Dgernesiais has no separate ISO-639 code but is listed under French (fra). Latitude: 49°26'N, Longitude: 2°35'W. A SOAS field trip in Spring 2009 recorded 50+ hours of native speakers, several in their 90’s. Funding is sought to transcribe, annotate and analyse these data and to undertake further documentation, especially of the related language variety of Sark, thought to have only 20 speakers.