 Dwi'n meddwl, wrth gwrs, wrth gwrs y cyffredinol Cymru. Mae'r cymdeithas fel ymlaen, i'r Llywodraeth Cymru, ac yn gyfnod i'r hynny'n gyffredinol Cymru, ac yn gallu gwneud i'r rŵn, yn gyfnod i'r lleol am lŵr yn gwisig antropologi. Mae'n ddweud yn roi'r amser bod ydych chi ddweud ar gyfer tŵr. yn cael ei gynhyrchu gwahoddiadol, yn ddwy gael y ffordd, oherwydd Lleon yn ymwneud yn yng Nghymru. Mae'r ddiwethaf yn ymddangos i'r ysgol yn 10 oes? Yn 10 oes? Yn 10 oes. Mae'n tynnod fideo fel ymbydd yw'r 14 oes. A dyna, mae'n cael ei bwysig yn ymwneud, yn ymddiolol yn ddifoligol, Smith University of London, which is a hotbed of Channel Islands language activism. There's been two others at least I know of who have done degrees on something to do with their language while there. Anyway, without further ado, welcome Liam. There you guys. See I'm sort of going to go through my presentation. It's not, I guess it's not as formal as a lot of others. It's sort of, there's been some slides, there's been some discussion as we go through, hopefully. The general idea of my presentation is to introduce visual anthropology as a discipline itself to language documentation and see what we can do and how visual anthropology as a field can aid in language documentation. My presentation focuses on minority languages as a tool of resistance, especially in Jersey. The film I'll be showing shortly follows William Renniff, who's my grandfather, and he was four at the outbreak of the Sephard World War. It follows his tale of Jersey under occupation and recounts his memory and the way that Geryl is used is both a tool of resistance and is a tool to recount certain memories. The film itself isn't English, there's a bit of Geryl in it, it discusses Geryl mostly. My work that I'm carrying on this year is a film that will be filmed entirely in Geryl. I think I'm trying to understand different things as I'm going along through my research and definitely I try and blur the lines between anthropology, language documentation, psychogeography, art and various different disciplines to really try and contextualise language documentation inside sort of a bigger whole that has definitely political and cultural influences. Both politics with a big key and a small key definitely, as I'll show you in a set, sort of the official Jersey line on preserving Geryl is necessarily taken to count the political importance of it and it's very much so sort of a task in very basic tick box cultural preservation. So hopefully I'm entering a debate inside language documentation and inside vision anthropology, definitely a reflexivity and hopefully I can talk about that a bit later as well. So I'll start with a coit there, where there's power, there's resistance. It's a good writer Michelle Foucault. So a bit like Jersey, it's an island, as you can see there, really, really small, situated in the English Channel. It makes up one of the Chal Islands, so the three sort of biggest ones, maybe a clue for a Jersey, Guernsey, Aldermen Sart and as well as that as Herm, Jettu, Leeu, Brecku, Baru and the Minkies. Some of the islands aren't inhabited by real people, they're inhabited by multi-billion hens, you just sort of stay there for tax loopholes. Probably you'll know Jersey, I've heard of Jersey because in 2016 the Pano Art papers were released and they implicated world leaders and celebrities in 11,000 cases of tax avoidance. Jersey has been targeted as a place that has been found to be holding money, including a good friend David Cameron's money, he doesn't know how it got there. So I think sort of the landscape of the front of Jersey, if you come in on the boat if anyone's ever been there and wants to go, you'll sort of see these big pieces of finance spectacle on the shore front, these big glass HSBC buildings and stuff. It really seems to be like a pinnacle of sort of catalyst globalisation. This is the image that many people have of the Channel Islands, people drinking champagne on yachts and definitely some darker times, some dark headlines have come out at Jersey, not just about tax avoidance but about awful historical abuse and different things like that. It's definitely been an island that's been shrouded in secrecy over the years. But I guess what I'm here to do really is, whilst I think all of that is dreadful and I do a lot to try and fight that, not just as an image of Jersey but in general we need to highlight the problems, I try and sort of subvert the narrative of that big finance spectacle in my work. So I talk about the occupation. So Jersey was under Nazi occupation between 1940 and 1945. It was the only place in the West Shiles that was occupied. The occupation stopped a lot of things coming in and out of Jersey and sort of the area and the time that I'm going to try and talk about and see how that affected the historical makeup and definitely the discourse of Jersey and Jersey culture and language preservation in general. So yeah, Jerry, it's a language in which Jersey people, as we've heard, exchanged poetry, stories, scandals, beliefs of business. It's a language of lullabies and laughs, satire and so on and so much Jersey history is recorded only in Jersey. It's a living language when it comes to passing it on to generations to come. I think it's important to note as well that Jerry is not the official language of Jersey and the laws are not written in Jerry, they're written in legal French. And definitely Jerry has a connotation with sort of the working class and my grandfather always talks about how he speaks Jerry and he speaks good French and that's really interesting how he mentions the word good French and that was what he was meant to talk and sort of the proper way, the proper way of talking especially in schools. So here is the Jersey Government website and this is the bit about Jerry, about Jersey's traditional language. So in 2001 there were 2,874 people who spoke Jerry. Now we think there's about 1% so that's probably about 1,000 people although I'm not sure, I'd say it could be a bit less than that, I'm not totally sure and it's definitely a very sort of Asian population speaker so literally as the days go forward there are less and less people who are able to speak it. So yeah there's Jerry Educational School which I went through and it's optional in the age of starting with about 6, about 6 years old. And I guess sort of what I've talked about, the idea that I'm trying to bring to the floor of this is sort of the way that the government in Jersey is portraying Jerry is. Although they do say a few things about Jerry, they don't understand it in its entirety, its cultural and political importance and I think even if we're not physically learning the language then I think we really need to start learning why it's politically important and why it's politically important to so many other ways that people are resisting in the world right now. So Lofis de Jerry is sort of the centre that the lessons take place from. There's their website and they've got three teachers, I think they're looking for another one at the moment because again they're getting a bit older and retiring. The sort of stuff they have on their website is really cool. There's sort of some recordings, I'll play a bit of one of them now. There's some recordings of Jerry, but it's like a very stand-on. This is how Jerry has spoken. Here's a face of someone speaking Jerry with very little context. So Lani, I'll play a bit of one now. So there you go. That's Gary, he's one of the Jerry teachers at the moment. The work they do is really important. They're pretty underfunded and I guess what I'm trying to do instead of critique their work at all because yet again I think it's really important is build on it and contextualise it. It's the most important thing. So I made a film last year for my second year BA project which I'm continuing this year. So I'm basically here to show you my film, my work and then I'll talk about the politics afterwards and then I'm going to show you sort of the introduction to the continuation that I'm doing this year. So yeah, that's Gary, he's one of the Jerry teachers at the moment. The work they do is really important. They're pretty underfunded and I guess what I'm trying to do instead of critique their work at all because yet again I think it's really important is build on it and contextualise it. I think it's the most important thing. So I made a film last year for my second year BA project which I'm continuing this year. So I'm basically here to show you my film, my work and then I'll talk about the politics afterwards and then I'm going to show you sort of the introduction to the continuation that I'm doing this year. So yeah, I'm good. One minute of the midnight tonight, Tuesday the 8th of May. But in the interest on saving lives, the ceasefire began yesterday to be sounded all along the front and our dear channel items are also to be free today. Why the Jersey French important to the war? Important to yes, especially with the farming community. If we could flammock see opposition by telling stories of underweight results of their farming or hiding pigs or hiding cattle that weren't registered to be killed and fed to the asshole plus feds and neighbors. Is it a good tool? I don't personally think so, but it's a dying tool. Tuesday the 8th is not going to be going for much longer. It will still be with a bit of a farming community, but with young people and ordinary people, no. Not many in our speaking Jersey French. So where abouts your going? I'm going normal now. What's the part about normal? The over that way, about 35 miles is the coast of France. It's on some more. And that's where the main port that furnished and they've supplied the Germans over here. I was taking and then they were stuck. Well, as you can see, these two boxes all round. It was heavily defended. But there was gun in places like this all around the island. There was one by coastal where we were. But there were some everywhere. I was wondering if you could tell me what sort of punishments to the people that were found to be resisting the occasion in here? France saved it from me. It's on more to you. But it's not buried. I'm buried, but there's no point. I'm buried, but something's left. I think what he did is what he just said. In other words, I went into a barrel to get at them because they were shooting. I'm going in the barrel. So I did, but there's no bottom in the barrel. So I went in. I think I didn't stop. This stone was laid when he bring us the cross parcels. Who got the beef? Beef for victory, right? Beef for victory. It's also one in the order square. It was done by Stanmasons as they were doing the square out. They did it underneath the Germans that knows. Wow. And there's where they're sitting. Christmas of 1944, as we were sitting down to, OK, no, big clean of meals, but we were better off than the Germans who, well, in fact, there was one German officer trying to get sweets out of frozen ground whilst we were sitting to our Christmas lunch of roast chicken, more likely potatoes, the cabbage that we ground and vegetables, and apple pies to finish. We had enough flour to make the pie up. We were controlled. We had to supply so much to German authorities of wheat, of livestock. We had too many cattle and we had to give one up. We'd be sent to the pigs that were registered. One of some had to go to the German troops. But there was a lot on the farms that weren't registered, and how they got killed and hung and quartered and hidden is quite a story. In fact, some Germans used to come in and search, and someone had half a pig in a bed with a grandma. And grandma was very sick. She couldn't get out of the bed, but the pork was there, say for future. Basically, let's forget the occupation. It's a long time past, and it won't be forgotten, not by people that were living here. It won't be forgotten by maybe the younger generation, because they were there, or probably even their parents were involved. That was my project that I did last year. My idea was to contextualise this idea of recording languages. You see, there's very little gerryet spoken in the piece, but I still think it's an important piece of documentation to document why this is important. It's documentation, it's anthropology, and it's activism. Something that I think I missed out earlier was, I guess, something that I will be working on during my further work, is trying to maybe undo the homogenisation of the language. In 1972, Frank Limhage, he compiled the English-Gerryet Dictionary, and that's being updated as a future. It's homogenised the language into one, and that's not the case. My grandmother lived about three miles away from my grandfather, and sometimes the language was so different that it couldn't be comparable. I think it usually changes, the language changes significantly every 360 yards to a mile, because it was very much so based on farms or community of farms. My grandma, who is in St Bralais, for the word spider, she said, my grandfather, who was in St Martins, which is sort of the other side of the island, said speed, and it was just that differentiation of languages, and I guess it's sort of, again, what I'm trying to break. I'm talking about vision anthropology more now. I think when talking about vision anthropology, it's such a big and contested subject of reflexivity, representation, the sensorial term that's happening at the moment, and definitely the effects of post-modernism on the discipline in general. I had a few issues with making a film as to all anthropologists and to all filmmakers. My first issue was time. I was a second year student. I'm only a third year student now. The time and the format that I was allowed to put this in or that I could put this in was definitely limiting to say what I wanted to say. As you can see, it's pretty shaky, and that's due to easy jets, ridiculous prices for taking more luggage home. That was obviously an issue. I didn't have a tripod with me. I just had my camera. I guess the massive thing that I think we need to always think about is the camera's effect and the physical power relation that the camera can bring to any situation. Obviously that's my grandfather, who I know very well. He still talks very differently. As soon as I put that camera in between us, he talks differently. He's from an older generation as well, but maybe he isn't used to... Everyone now is continuously taking videos, continuously taking photographs, continuously sharing them, uploading them. He's not really used to that. Having a camera out when he was younger was for a special occasion. Having a camera out now, it's very much so... Oh, I don't want to do it sometimes. He told me as well, because I went back to him. I really want to continue this project and continue working with you for my third year and hopefully beyond. He was like, I'm not sure if I want to, because I don't speak very good Jerry. That was some sort of... It was a bit upsetting, actually, to hear him say that, to think that I had to create the perfect, documented, academic piece that didn't have much reflexivity in it. What I want to show as well, as a document, a reflexive document of my relationship with my grandfather and his relationship with this language that is dying out. I think another issue I have as well is I try to sit down with him and basically say, how should we edit this? Because I don't want this to be my artifact, my piece. I want this to be a piece where we both can say something. My lecturer says that filming is about buying the ingredients and when you edit, it's cooking the ingredients and making something. He was maybe a bit reluctant sometimes for that sort of end product. I think maybe if I had more of his input and there's no fault of either of us, really, if I had more of his input and we could have edited it together, maybe we could have come up with a different constructive product which I think we really need to think about in both visual anthropology and language documentation. We are going on an artistic endeavour. We are creating something. We are creating a film. We are creating a piece of art. It is only a reflection of our own thoughts and creativity of this process. I guess anthropology traditionally makes the unfamiliar seem familiar and I guess sort of what I was trying to do in this work is sort of flip that narrative and make for me the familiar seem unfamiliar and put it in this product and put it inside. I had 10 to 15 minutes this film put it inside 10 minutes and that's really difficult. I find that really difficult this year as well and how I'm able to set it out just containing it inside this one product. I think that's something we've got to be really careful of with visual anthropology and with language documentation and with various things that use that technology is we're not just filming this in this passive encounter we are creating something and we are creating a power dynamic in it. I guess the last thing as well is sort of the anthropologist as activist dialogue and that's been a round of anthropology for a long time and it's sort of like at what point do I stop being a passive narrator and a passive unlocker and what point do I start getting involved with activism and I think when it comes to geriae I have been involved with activism in geriae. As I got older and at school especially being involved in it you can get ridiculed for being involved with this sort of thing just for old people and I guess I have been involved with activism and the documentation of geriae. I worked as a transcriber when I left school for three months transcribing geriae nitsia into a computer system and I guess I really wanted to continue that through the anthropological lens. So now I'm going to talk a bit more about resistance geriae resistance in Jersey and other types of resistance that took place during the Nazi occupation exactly what they were resisting. So here is a bunker and these all around the island in this picture here. So the bunker that I was filming my film is one of these and these are all around the outside of the island and they were looking out to stop people coming in these massive stoic structures of power I think it really affected people living on the island and I think there's something really to be said about psycho-geography and I think they serve as a memory of the fact that power is everywhere as going back to before definitely in a Foucaudian sense but these structures can seem somewhat unimportant under his analysis. So I guess I started to make me think about what would happen if the structures were in the middle and looking outwards and Foucaud understands the idea of a panopticon and a prison popularised by Bentham and it has it's a circular prison and it has a central watchtower and from there the warden can look into different cells that lit up and the effect of that is that in each cell the prisoners, they start to self-govern and Foucaud said that that is stretching to every part of society and people have become sort of self-governing and it goes from a compact mass to a collection of separated individuals so that sort of start making me thinking and he says that all these things going to the school into the clinic, into the museum all these different institutions there are these power structures that are really apparent and my grandfather when he was at school he spoke French, the French language at school and that power structure again was very apparent and his idea of speaking good French compared speaking Gérier I think is definitely the effect of this power and I think it's really important again that we view especially for my work in viewing Gérier as that form of resistance and as that form of rebuilding loads of atomised atomised individuals and definitely a sense of community and the resistance community are people who speak Gérier my grandfather and his friends go once a month to lunch together and they all speak Gérier together and there's that sense of community and that sense of building and through this language and it is just like a language exchange there is that sense of community and that political discourse and again Gérier was formed definitely working class solidarity and it ended up creating a divide from the monopoly of power when the Nazis were on the island they couldn't understand Gérier and that created a divide of those who can understand it and who can't understand it and very much provided a space of political resistance and definitely political resistance through linguistics as a form of subversion to the homogenous idea of fascism as an ideology so it became something that was inherently anti-fascist but that's not again, that's not the only sort of resistance that dictates on the island and I think that's a really important one to put it into a bigger maker so this is a posgiza by an artist called Claude Cahun and she's she was an artist who formed part of the resistance on the island and was probably one of the first openly transgender artists starting her work in the 1920s the importance of her work again similar to Gérier was this subversion of Nazi tactics and her and her girlfriend would put little notes in Nazi's cars and make continuously make pamphlets and make pictures of sort of gender and sexuality subversion basically in Nazi's cars and a lot of the time the Nazi end up blaming each other and fights would break out she was herself French I'm not sure there's no record particularly of whether she spoke Gérier but again like I say it all makes that build up of resistance on the island and I think definitely it's something that should be covered in schools that covered this intersection of resistance between language and part and psychography and politics like I was talking about before so today Gérier I'm not going to talk too much about Bad Lebec because you've got Kit Ashton who's going to be coming to give a talk I think in May April May sort of time so Kit's a member of the band Bad Lebec and the music is playing at the end of my video he's a good friend of mine and an activist for Gérier he's studying a PhD in Ethnomusicology at Goldsmiths as well and definitely Gérier is playing a really important part in popular culture at the moment in Jersey and I think that idea that which I think it's definitely trying to be popularised but not in it's crazily fresh and not something just regurgitated and I know that as well as sort of this this activism in popular culture in Jersey what we're finding as well is that the narrative of Gérier can often any language can often be tied to nationalism but it's most definitely the politicians that are on the left that are adopting these ideas of popular culture in Jersey as one for Taddea he's also a member of the band he's part of the Particle Reform Jersey which you're on the left and I guess that's sort of the importance of learning it and definitely fighting fighting fascism and making it a product of this sort of progressive politics I want to talk a bit about Liberation Day in Jersey Liberation Day is celebrated on the 9th of May in Guernsey is it the 8th? is it the 9th as well? and it's the celebration of the liberation of the Chang Islands everyone gets a day off and Gérier plays a really important part in that celebration see if I can find it sorry I've got the no it's just a sound clip anyway this is a song at the Liberation Day every year there's some words spoken in Gérier and the children are learning Gérier at school they take part in these celebrations and it forms a very central part of remembering the island's liberation and remembering exactly what happened and yet it's forming a really important part of the culture and I think preserving it is really really important but not for any sort of nationalist agenda at all but very much for understanding it as a form of political resistance and understanding it in its context and I think I think the government especially I love to talk to them and to have an open dialogue of the way that they regard the language and the way that they're trying to promote the language because I think we definitely need to re-look at it so yeah my future work so I'm continuing to work in this area this year my trailer for my film that I'll be completing in April and I love to come share that film so I'll be great and I guess this one's a lot more about how language and memory are connected and especially about how language and memory are trapped inside industries at times passing jazzy are trapped inside this language and how this memory can be recounted definitely playing in sort of the politics of memory and official and unofficial narratives of memory so this is my trailer for my latest film language spoken by only 1,000 people and the small island of jazzy is situated 14 miles from the north coast of France it is a language of the verge of extinction spoken mostly by older generations for recording the memories of jazzy in times past as jazzy's tap table stages that comes more and more scrutinised of the industries such as agriculture are overshadowed this ethnographic exploration of minority languages and identity will tell a story of industry and memories trapped inside sharing I don't use sharing as a language through on a daily basis but we meet up with friends of the farming industry and share the idea is spoken it's if we don't want anybody to understand what we're talking about we talk share the idea why do you still talk share the idea between us unthigurously formalised seems a language tied to the working class the farm and the fishing and the tradesmen there's this story about the effects of globalisation and capital or memory of minority languages and communication so that's my future work and I think definitely this time I'm going to be experimenting a lot more and definitely trying to blur the lines of a lot of different disciplines I'll be really influenced by the work of Sarah Pink who's a visual anthropologist and turned towards what someone says as the sensorial term and the term for understanding different pieces in different senses and understanding the world through different senses at the moment there's a lot of work happening at Harvard which is really really impressive creating these sensorial artefacts that are really like pushing the boundary of what visual anthropology can do and I think really pushing the boundary of what other disciplines such as language documentation can do and it's trying to connect I guess the dots in different ways and trying to connect the way that we understand this or the way that we're trying to break from this sort of scientific rationalism to create an artefact a piece of art and a film in itself and not be ashamed of that so I think it's really important that instead of trying to document things sort of just head on whilst that's important and understand people communicating creating artefact of yourself and being reflexive and embracing things is really important for the future of visual anthropology and hopefully that can break into different disciplines as well so yeah, thank you very much Is your grandmother still alive or not? No, she's not, unfortunately How different is GIE from the language in South Korea and Guernsey? Do they understand each other? Yeah probably, I think I could understand there's a French Julie's better too and what I didn't understand very well is is it taught or not taught? It is taught, yeah, no it is taught you get when I was taught in you get like a workbook and it's a bit sort of like you get schools in French, you get a workbook you can go through week by week by week and I've written about I don't know if it's in a book or an article I've read it about the proficiency of young gerier speakers I mean at school I only got half an hour to an hour a week and what happened as well because I was an assistant teacher as well for a bit and what would happen is you'd usually take place during assembly or sometime in school and they'd send kids problems concentrating stuff to this class so they weren't the teacher's problem anymore so it became a lot more an issue of crowd control that actually getting to grips with learning a new language and half an hour just really isn't enough but I know that Gareth Tony and Colin who all teach gerier they're working so so hard trying to push it in schools and they've now come up with the TGJ which is the detection of our gerier which is sort of the GCSE equivalent I was the first person to go through that in 2011 and I think they've got a few people since and they're sort of trying to I don't know if it's the right way to go about it but trying to have it more on a par and trying to bring it up to the way that French is taught in schools in Jersey and we start learning French at four in Jersey, sort of the way that it's taught I think it's about what does gerier mean to the youth of Jersey I mean are they interested are they active not a lot really it's more and I think that's why this is really important I think that's why contextualising is really important there's a lot of people in Jersey who care about politics and who care about the sort of thing the interesting sort of thing as well and I think sort of sitting through I don't know if you do languages at school Exactly sitting through learning languages at school is a really arduous task and not very exciting and to actually continue doing that in the same way a lot of people don't necessarily want to do that and I think that's why it's really important that we start connecting in different ways and building different bridges that we haven't thought about before but I think I was the just like anthology of gerier poetry and I was the youngest publisher from there for about 40 years so like it was me and the person after that was about maybe 30-40 years older than me Would you say that because obviously you talked about how gerier was spoken mostly by the working class and how it was a language for the working class especially like now it's mostly farmers and things like that would you say it's a limited language in that you wouldn't really be able to update it to speak sort of in the same way that we speak contemporary English and French it's not really a contemporary language would you say that or would you say that they evolve in the same way? They definitely update it and are creating new words for the dictionary but I think the issue of the homogenisation of the language and trying to create it into this one singular entity because it's not French and it's not English it's very different even to call it one language instead of various I wouldn't even say it's one language of various dialects I'd say sometimes it's very different different types of things and I think I think trying to keep it up to date can prove quite difficult So if you were saying you were trying to sort of foreground the differentiation between all the different types of sharia so how does that translate into being in schools and being taught where obviously you would need presumably that would lean more towards the standardised more than wouldn't it especially if you were trying to also do graded qualifications Of course How do those two things fit together? I think as far as sharia is sharia teaching if we had a limited time and limited resources teaching different types and understanding different types would be really amazing but it's not idealistic and we don't and I think I think what Franklin H who made the dictionary and what his son François continued to do for sharia is really really really important and it was at a time that it was needed that sharia was this really important thing really important politically and to get it out there in a way that people could digest was really important, I think we should continue that but I also think we need to understand it's different things to put it in a political context and I guess that's more what I was trying to say I think it should carry on teaching absolutely but I think it should be in addition to it It sounds to me that you're a relatively unusual case as a sort of younger person who's taken a learning of sharia quite far and quite seriously obviously you've worked with people who are trying to revive this stuff and you want to be optimistic but in a sort of very realistic sense how optimistic are you about the chance of revitalising and arresting that decline? Realistically we don't bury but that's why I think that's why again I'm saying that things like this are important because even if we don't revitalise the physical language and speaking of the language if we can revitalise its importance in a political context that's really important and I know that school children I stopped learning it at school when I was 17 so that was five years ago and I've been in London for four years now so I'm pretty out of touch with exactly what they're doing at the moment and I think I'd love to see what they're doing I don't know if they've had they haven't increased uptake? Do you know? No, I can tell you I mean this is your talk but I can I've got a lot of equation about that Yeah, absolutely They have actually produced two more teachers but the uptake has gone down significantly because they've started what they call payon the talking places which are basically centres of excellence for teaching degree but the problem is that it's straight up to school and the kids can't get to other schools to do it and parents will work so yeah it's been a bit disastrous You find there's like a really really steep decline into secondary school as well so you'll have maybe a class of, think of my primary school there was maybe 10 of us 10, 12 of us learning it and when I got to secondary school there was a sharp decline into, I think, three of us and I guess there was like a there's a massive issue as well that when I was 16 I was in the same class as someone who's 12 and at a different level to me because they don't have the resources to continue to be teaching so I'd be working in my booklet while someone else is working in the booklet and you know as much as as much as as much as they really really really really tried to it becomes difficult and I definitely think the three teachers that I knew like absolutely amazing what they do and I can't commend them enough what they do and I think they find it difficult and really frustrating the constraints that they have Did your parents speak it? My parent my mum again I'm not totally sure because it's never like my grandad when he speaks it because to him it was never like an official language he slips between French, Gerry and English and he very much slips in and out of all of them my mum slips in and out of a lot of them and I wouldn't say it she's not she's not to the level of my grandad can I definitely can't speak it fluently but we use phrases and we use different things in the house that will be in Gerry I think my uncles my uncle can maybe speak it a bit more but yes because it's not formalised difficult to really tell a fluency level unless you're going to by the official dictionary sort of level it's difficult to tell a fluency level In terms of discrepancies you described between dialects you gave the example of the spider are there lots of different sort of other concepts like discrepancies within concepts you can describe in Gerry and then also concepts you can describe in Gerry but not English or for example in English do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah I mean there's like different sayings so like my grandad when he's angry he's like pissed in the morning there's a feel full of parsnips which makes absolutely no sense but it sort of rolls off the tongue there's different discrepancies of different terms and different concepts my level of Gerry is influent and it wouldn't be enough I wouldn't know enough to be able to tell you like a really clear distinctive answer but there are definitely yet discrepancies If you say it's like sort of slowing dying out and less people speaking it's how relevant is Gerry for national pride or nationalism like today How relevant is it for nationalism? I think ironically depends what way you understand how you understand nationalism I think for sort of like the nationalism in Giza there was like a a phrase like there's another boat in the morning we don't like it a little bit which is really awful in terms of that type of nationalism there's very much of we love Gerry A from that side of the camp nothing really being done to sort of revitalise it it's actually the more sort of progressive side that are doing the work to revitalise it and it's quite difficult to really to really tell and I think we need to be really careful of how we go about I go about about the revitalisation of it but we don't want to be exclusionary in any way and we want it to be like something everyone can be including everyone can enjoy and not this sort of national treasure at making really bad things I kind of do that don't I just I would have liked to know more about the linguistic history of how it came about in the area so it's got like different linguistic branches it's full name in English is Jersey Norman French and it's closely related to Genesie and other Chalala languages and yeah it's sort of whilst obviously you can hear the similarities the similarities to French it's very much a coming to like a lot of people from a lot of people who have like Jersey surnames I don't really like saying that but yeah a lot of the time it was to do with sort of Scandinavian people like the Vikings coming to colonise Normandy part of that so there's definitely like different sort of roots of Jersey as a language because it's not as because it's not really comparable like it's official something in English difficult to say that there are English words there are French words there are Jersey in and of itself words but yeah it's like a type of Norman Some of the words you can think of English in Jersey actually come from Norman because the Norman is invaded England in time 66 and not of English as it comes from Norman people often think it's like a mixture of French and English and actually it's not as well as the older also my grandmother always tells me stories so he employed what Portuguese workers to work on his farm and the actual similarities that he found between Portuguese and Jersey it's quite surprising some words are identical it's like Kazakh which is co is a word that is completely identical and you'll find as well that a lot of in a lot of classes for adult language area you'll find a lot of of Portuguese and Polish and Eastern European learners in the class compared to sort of this the people who like do sort of the anti-immigrant nationalists who claim to love Jersey won't actually go to these classes so you'll find that you'll find that a lot in the classes Do many of the texts exiles the isn't worth it? No I don't think so because like our laws are laws of French and our laws aren't in Jersey but yeah I mean Guernsey has its own language and you know Ireland man has its own language so yeah and actually our English as a language came mostly through trade through Canada rather than you know we have close proximity to England there's actually trade through Canada mostly that brought English to the island rather than England itself So is schooling in English or in French? English yeah I'm not actually sure if the stories in English are laws are laws that are in French and not many people speak French and I'm not sure if or like on statistics if we counted what we counted as as a nation for English speaking and French speaking I'm not sure statistically what we'd be we counted as Do you know Julia if we were English or French speaking? Both Both? Would it be both? But if you want to be a lawyer in Jersey you have to pass French test as well There are also people who don't study English in the Channel Islands because it's both the contact variety and also yeah it's interesting that that's a Canadian link I'm very interested in this issue of homogenisation versus if you like direct or richness I can talk to you about that one if you want to Yeah absolutely Some people I'm actually being in Jersey this month because I'm evolving in a separate project which I'm hoping you might perhaps become involved in which actually as part of the ASAIMS is to document the regional richness because we're very aware that that's disappearing very very fast even of the few people and some people recognise as few as 100 fluent speakers now many of them come from the one area which is in the west where more and more country-filed areas which is the one that dictionary is based on so and we know that some of the regional dialects are lost because I've had dialects somewhere recently unfortunately My grandfather's dialect San Mata which is on the east of the island he took me for a drive down the road and you could probably point to maybe 10 farms that have that dialect which is quite interesting so the island is about 12 parishes and roughly speaking people think of it like a dialect parish but it is way more than that some parishes can have two or three different variants inside it and it's only nine miles long by five miles wide as well so it's very very small Yeah that's what we've found in Jersey I've done more work is that there's what we think of as iconic differences and the one that everyone cites is O versus Owl in certain words and that's an east-west difference you have them around in Jersey but there's also much more interesting stuff that you find once you start listening to how people speak from different areas it's interesting iconic versus actual and there's not a myth about language or folk linguistics that you've got to find more much more interesting stuff behind that I think that's where Anthropology's role fits into this research and this debate in general because I think Anthropology itself is the study of things that aren't necessarily official or the study of taboos or whatever and I think that's where we can lend a hand especially with this multiple archive project is definitely lending a hand theoretically from Anthropology and physically from visual Anthropology to understand these different differentiations and understand them politically as well it's really important I just want to ask how are you because at the beginning you were talking about images of glass of capitalist globalisation in Jersey and I was just wondering how globalisation will play how is there a way in playing with globalisation how those two will mesh together and what the effect they'll have on each other again I guess the way what my work's going on now is that effect I think I reiterate over time that I think you do need to remember it's so important that what I'm talking about more is is the flow of capital when it comes to globalisation and not the flow of people because a lot of the time the idea of the flow of people in that effect in this area is what is what people get hung up on and I don't think that's right and I think that's playing into really really dangerous dialogues and I think of the idea about the flow of capital and the big financials capital spectacle and the big financialisation of the island and the loss of the agricultural industry does play a really really big part in sort of the loss of Jersey and of Jersey becoming more and more and more and it's still unfair it's going more and more like fast-paced and more and more about about fine markets Do you share your words to five like nans for example in everyday English parlance for example in particular domains like farming or are there words like kind of technical I didn't really realise this but the term vergy I don't know if that's a term that's used it's a quart of an acre I don't know if that's used in English so it's like my grandad always talked about things in vergy which I thought was an English word for age and apparently he told me like last maybe four weeks ago there was actually wasn't an English word and then farming they do talk about vergy as measurements of of of farming and and yeah I think a lot of this is French though because obviously the laws are French when we're talking about stuff like partitions and stuff a lot of time that would be that would be more in French but I don't really know particular like gerry words they're definitely like Jersey slang words that are gerry that are used but not gerry at such I don't think Do you use the word dwi Not like I've heard no In Guernsey it's a word for a watercourse on stream and that's definitely part of the local English but no one else would understand Not that I'm not aware of that but yeah I mean I again I could just not know because something something like measuring land is not something I really talked to anyone about so I had no idea that it was it wasn't an English word Have you found that families speak to the at home I mean with children Not really No because a lot of the time you know people people in my generation are now having children so it would be the great grandparents that would be the gerry speakers not even the grandparents so there is that like massive massive disconnect between those that like generational gap I know a few years ago Tony mentioned to me there was something about a child that was speaking gerry at home but again I left the island when I was 18 I haven't really kept in touch I'm not sure if that is the case Do you know if that's the case? I wasn't mentioned when I was last there but maybe it's one of these myths Again this was before the child was born and Tony had this conversation about the child being brought up by Lingoli but I don't know if that's happened It's one in Guernsey OK I agree I think I'm when I was about 17 I was I mean I wouldn't describe myself as a speaker because I'm not fluent but yeah because I was the youngest person to publish the youngest person that could understand gerry that I knew Well it's 4 to 5 no one else wants to discuss anything else so I'm speaking a germ to Do you want to go to the Institute of Education after this yeah and continue the conversation in less promise roundings we'll also be going to have a meal later if anyone would like to join us for 12 to 11 in the evening you are very welcome Thank you very much for coming Greatness is such a good turnout