 L'attitude est amée, mi-apie, de l'ouaime et cuve, de tous les bords. Chez qui s'aider, check la m'aider, hohalla, et check où ramenter la volonté. Mon père, est-ce qu'il peut savoir que je suis film de saison main-pager, tu andrais en chancontain d'année plus tard. En accrède ton affil grec par son fille à quoi pour être né ? Est-ce qu'il peut savoir qui servit le symbole pour les mauvais changements qui étaient déjà envoyés transformer notre petit île ? C'est très important d'avoir le contact avec France et l'Angleterre. Nous avons introduit des mots de français et anglais, et aussi des mots du monde. Jersey est un endroit très beau, mais ça a changé beaucoup dans les années. L'organisation, la population, l'occupation, et l'industrie a changé d'un phénomène traditionnel, et la fissure, le tourisme, et la finance. Et aujourd'hui, Jersey a un challenge, pas seulement pour la langue, mais aussi pour l'identité culturelle. Pourquoi est-ce que ça s'est passé et qu'est-ce qu'on peut faire ? Je pense que tous les langues ont leurs challenges. La langue internationale, la langue française, n'est pas seulement par l'anglais, mais aussi par les langues régionales qui réassurent leur indépendance. La langue française est la seule langue officielle jusqu'à 1900, et l'anglais est la langue principale de commerce. La langue française n'a jamais eu place officielle, ce qui signifie que nous ne voulons pas récaparer une usage officielle, c'était toujours une usage culturelle, c'était aussi toujours une langue de communauté, et c'est la sort de communauté que nous essayons de continuer. C'est mon premier question, les gars, si nous sommes prêts. Nous avons fait beaucoup, depuis notre premier album launch dans le monde, nous avons fait beaucoup de choses, nous avons fait des gigs, nous avons fait du Jersey, France, et on a fait le Grandet, on a fait le concert du Sunset au Grandet. Nous avons joué sur le top de la haine avec la pop dans la danse. Qu'est-ce qu'il s'agit du social club ? Wow, oui, oui. Après Jersey Live ? Oui, Jersey Live, Postclaw. Nous avons fait beaucoup de choses, est-ce que vous pensez qu'on va faire de la différence pour le futur de Jamia ? Ou est-ce que nous sommes juste en train d'avoir la paix ? C'est un petit moyen, oui. Ils aiment les chansons, les enfants. Les enfants de l'école aiment les chansons. J'ai un petit fan club, je ne sais pas si vous l'avez remarqué, mais c'est un petit fan club. Ils aiment les chansons. Ils sont dans la danse, ils sont dans le concert. Ils aiment les chansons. Et ils sont adultes, oui ? Oui, ils sont. Vous m'avez promis que je produisais de la musique pour les écoles à laquelle Badlabek a été formé. Comment l'a-t-il été ? Et quel rôle est-ce que la musique peut jouer dans le programme de revitalisation ? Je pense que c'est important de mettre en place quelque chose moderne et de mettre en place quelque chose d'interprétation qui signifie que nous pouvons aller straight into presenting the heritage, but not necessarily from, this is old stuff, it's boring, it's out of date. Now we can say this is all contemporary, this is going on now. This is why we have these things which are different from other places and also presenting it in a catchy way which basically gives it each theme a theme to. Et la musique ? Comment la musique peut aider ? C'est ça, c'est une vielle chanson avec des bons musiciens. Compté. Oui, car ils sont des bons musiciens. Tu en dis qu'il n'aie pas écrit pour la politique, c'est bon effet. I think culture for me without going into all the various definitions is about wellbeing of the individual and that means equally understanding where people have come from and where they are now and it's about people making a difference and all those sorts of things and I think for us we have a requirement, a need to keep the language alive but I think my concern was when I first came in as an assistant minister three years ago was how could you do that when there didn't seem to be a lot of succession planning the battle becks was very embryonic at that point in time and there didn't seem to be that connection that's where it really runs it is that there are the people who still speak it today who meet on a regular basis who are of the past as it were but if you want to keep a language alive you somehow got to engage the kids and get them focused on it and make them understand why it's important why it's different. So that's the question is we've got this special language as part of our history and our heritage but do you think it's a good idea to keep it alive or should we just say what do you think show hands, should we keep it alive yeah kind of split but that's cool there's only a few hundred people that speak it in silence and anywhere else in the world I don't think there'll be anyone so if I go somewhere like Germany I speak it there and no one have a clue that's true yeah and that's a really good point because if we're going to spend some of our resources teaching GERIA in schools then that could be money spending teaching German so that's a really good point I guess one of the questions that I have about that is if we've got this special language that's unique to us as part of our history wouldn't it be a bit of a shame to let it disappear completely yeah actually it would be a shame I wouldn't see why it would be helpful that's just what I think and then one answer to that is possibly that if we had GERIA really popular in Jersey if we were going to Jersey we could join in with that and it's a way of sharing whether you're born here or not whether you're rich or poor whether you've got different backgrounds it's a way of sharing that Jersey-ness you saw what I mean so it might help to sort of unite people within the island what do you think about that actually yeah in words if some people come over speaking GERIA as well as it's being able to tell something that you can say we are our own south you know as an island we're separate to France and the UK and this is what we have this is something that is unique to us and it makes a stand apart something we can be proud of and I think that's quite important as a community or as a culture that you've got something that is a little bit different I think it's one of those things that the past informs the present and this is it's that kind of golden thread of existence that runs all the way through and people kind of recognise it and here's another question do you think that music can help to keep the language alive yeah well a lot of people listen to music even if you're young or old so everyone would be listening to it and you could just pick up words as you go and then you might think like oh I know a little bit now I might want to get a class to kind of learn the whole language I think it would definitely spark off interest in people to learn it what about making some GERIA music would that help you to learn it if you were going to sing in GERIA yeah Charlotte what do you think about that yeah I really think it would help because it would spark off interest it would really just just have an interesting way of learning it and that is if you're actually singing in GERIA cool or rapping do you fancy rapping in GERIA well a lot of people might fair enough oh what I think is the conundrum at the moment we're in a stage where we're essentially about preserving or documenting GERIA and I don't know how you get to the point of being organically it's to be preserved and spoken there needs to be an organic demand for that and I tend to see that we're quite in that stage yet as a society and we've developed I'm not going to say exponentially but very much since 1945 now in terms of population basically doubled demographics are completely different a very cosmopolitan society I think that's one of the challenges but perhaps you know or something less authentic the death of GERIA has been imminently predicted since the early 19th century still hanging on the thing is that in order to save GERIA it must be used GERIA is Jersey's hidden treasure it's up to us to dig it up and share it with everyone I think it's down to young people to understand what GERIA means really to them and to do that music is a really good vehicle we learn from the past it captures those parts of the past that we remember it is once again that golden thread and it allows young people to connect and that's the thing that will really keep it alive so you've got to connect with them and they then have to connect subsequently with others and that will keep the language alive les gens GERIA font-ils courciemment par les yeux inconnus du siècle Chivin ou fio-tonti selon l'amader GERIA en pré-chante la langue des nos ancêtres je leur prendra-t-il et chante-t-on-t-il à neuf chansons à tuy-i la fin du temps fatiguée mais pour acheter dansons soooo yeah, there we are because we've slightly changed the order yeah I'll do my little introduction of Jersey I should say thank you to the department for inviting me of course it's a shame she's not here but thanks Sophie for looking after me and it is a privilege to be here although we are few in number it's still good and also a privilege to in some sense represent Jersey our culture and language of GERIA is a small but beautiful and slightly strange island sitting as it does so close to France and yet being British but with its own independent sense of self so yeah, I thought it would probably be quite good to give you a quick overview of Jersey culture and I don't need to tell you guys no doubt about language revitalisation but some of the theoretical aspects that I'm engaging with in my work as you may well know that half the world's languages are endangered more or less and whilst many activists and academics are working towards language safeguarding and revitalisation few studies have looked in depth at the potential role of music in this process so I've been exploring one key aspect of the usefulness of music in language revitalisation perhaps the most profound aspect and that is how music can shape identity so through research including my field work in Jersey my work aims to illuminate why and even how music could play a useful role via applied ethnomusicology so Jersey's the largest of the Channel Islands they're still just 15 by 8 kilometres in size so it's still pretty small with a population of about 100,000 and GERIA as we heard in the film is a distinct dialect of Norman which is unique to the island having evolved there since the establishment of the Duchy of Normandy in the year 933 so it's a Latin based romance language influenced by Norse with traces of Celtic, Germanic and latterly French and English so it was commonly spoken across the island once upon a time with many residents being at least bilingual if not trilingual with English and proper French of course, you usually call it but its use has declined over the past two centuries under increased anglicisation and GERIA is now severely endangered with only an estimated of 100 or so fluent speakers left in the island almost all over the age of 65 so nowadays less than 3% of the population claim any real working knowledge of GERIA and despite all the cultural GERIA has survived and recent years have seen the beginnings of revitalisation thanks to the efforts of a few key activists and organisations and music has been an active part of the revitalisation strategy so in 2012 I was commissioned by Lough East of GERIA which is the government department to look after the language I guess so I was commissioned to arrange and record six GERIA folk songs in a more current style for GERIA teachers to use as a resource in their schools work and that commission really led to the founding of BADLAVEC which is the band we saw in the film which is a ten piece GERIA pop folk band that grew out of that commission and is now relatively well established in the local cultural landscape performing regularly at festivals releasing recordings and appearing in the local press raising the profile of the language and helping shape its public image as a living part of local cultural identity so BADLAVEC's repertoire mixes recontextualised traditional songs translated pop covers and original songs arranged in an eclectic style that draws on pop and folk influences from around the world et at this early stage of revitalisation there is a real need to engage with the public and address issues of language ideology and local identity not simply to teach about the language and its history but to present a positive vision of how GERIA can contribute to the richness of our society and to help people identify with and appreciate that personally and collectively so MADNEW is this short film that I made during my masters as part of a module ethnographic film for music research which was taught by Barley Norton who is actually now my supervisor for my PhD happy to say and so in this module we learned basic filmmaking skills and explored the possible uses of film as a research tool in our own context so obviously my context was Jersey and GERIA and I guess I just tried to give an impression of the island and the language as well as my personal connection to the story and I was really lucky to have that old footage that my dad shot when he was a fisherman it was amazing and I thought that was a great metaphor you know the idea of the culture as a sea that's always changing and MADNEW is a mariner sailor so you know just sort of took that from from the song that we sang and made that link and hopefully kind of give it an idea of the work and the context sorry it's a bit glitchy streaming it from the internet but hopefully it came across ok so there are a few key conceptual foundations that I'm working on or from so I thought I'd just just kind of run through them a lot of them will be very familiar but just make sense to kind of tell you where I'm coming from really so culture so taking this from the recent years in anthropology that have seen culture as not so much a fixed entity but unbounded contested, negotiated and historically produced so indeed every language and for that matter music is subject to the same cultural evolution fought out in everyday life where relations of power are exercised similarly both collective and individual identities are always evolving and constructed through time so I'm broadly making use of a non-essentialist conception of identity of the process rather than a fixed or unified thing this sense of self is embedded and integrated into an environment within which it dynamically evolves so regards culture, people like Mary have talked about this in regards to identity people like Stuart Hall and Judith Butler amongst many others have explored that constructivist approach so relating that to music loads of musicologists have written about that but in particular one called Simon Frith has written about the way that music doesn't just reflect values and identities but it constructs a social experience and listeners then adopt positions and take on identities in the course of performing the meaning of this experience to themselves so central to the idea of that is the way in which aesthetics can embody ethics and an understanding of individuality social relations and cultural ideals form constitutive elements of a musical aesthetic and as Frith says on the basis of this ethical codes and social ideologies are understood so I'm thinking about the way that can be engaged with in terms of language revitalization so musical sounds thus communicate, mobilize and organize collective identities and context and there's a quote from Frith which says music constructs our sense of identity through the direct experience it offers the body, time and sociability experiences which enable us to place ourselves in imaginative cultural narratives so obviously the concepts of language ideology is also really key and again I'm sure I don't need to tell you guys something about language ideologies which envision links of language to group and personal identity to aesthetics to morality and to epistemology so essentially engaging with questions of what is language for clearly it is more than just descriptive and propositional but has performative and expressive roles with inevitable consequences where language use is contested so understanding, engaging with and reshaping language ideology is obviously a necessary and in language revitalization so on a strategic level sociolinguists have proposed various measures and paths to revitalization and this is actually one area that I thought would be good to really ask you guys about because there's a certain amount of literature that I've come across and read that summarizes these paths and strategies but I'm mainly drawing on an article from Darken that sums up a lot of the stuff which is relatively old so there may be new stuff, recent stuff that I'm not aware of which I'd really appreciate knowing about so starting from the start Darken sort of points to Fishman's reversing language shift as a key text obviously as you guys know about with his graded intergenerational disruption scale and this has been obviously influential but also critiqued in recent decades so according to Darken many of the different measures that I've come through such as UNESCO scale Faber and Melis's socio profiles Giles's ethnolinguistic vitality Lewis and Simon's extension of Fishman's Gids and the Catherine Wheel from Strubel generally do know more than report on the ethnolinguistic vitality of a language as opposed to being a strategy for engaging although what Darken does talk about is the idea of combining Strubel's Catherine Wheel model with Faber and Melis's socio profiles approach working towards and another quote a comprehensive and multi disciplinarially conceived and multi dimensionnally oriented total concept that is intertwined with social reality as a prerequisite for successful language revitalisation so I'm simply proposing that music should be considered as a potentially important element of this total concept in particular for the way that it can contribute to the development of a cultural identity and influence language ideology so it's a matter of seeing whether it's strategising around combining Catherine Wheel with socio profiles or whatever I'm thinking about how music can be strategically placed into those models and so despite profound links between music, language and cultural identity a distinct gap exists between ethnomusicology and socio linguistics in the area of language revitalisation musicologists like Frith as I've mentioned so Donora and Stokes and various others have explored how a constructivist definition of identity relates to the experience of music and socio linguistics like Soas's own Julia Salibank have also stressed the importance of language identity but no in-depth studies to my knowledge have explicitly bought an ethnomusicological perspective to bear on the proactive reconstruction of cultural identity towards language revitalisation now, so now we're thinking about applied ethnomusicology so quick definition applied ethnomusicology is the approach guided by principles of social responsibility which extends the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding towards solving concrete problems and working towards working both inside and beyond typical academic contexts and the ICTM also formally advocates the use of ethnomusicological knowledge in influencing social interaction and cultural change always within the context of social responsibility and ethical approach so my main aim is to explore new ways to use music to positively foster a genuine grassroots engagement and identification with Gerier using an applied methodology and a constructivist conception of identity to help the community shift language ideology and reconstruct a cultural identity that embraces Gerier in a deep way so this would take a non-exclusive approach mais anyone can connect to this local identity via engagement with Gerier whether they were born in Jersey or not, creating fictive kinship that transcends perceived social cultural and genetic boundaries in a globalised multi-cultural world that's my vision and of course that can be contested, there can be others that will potentially want to use Gerier for very nationalistic reasons and that's an issue that I've got to deal with it's slightly brow-beating that poor child in the film saying why I think Gerier could be helpful and of course he had no choice but to agree but it's a genuine issue and a lot of people don't get the vision yet and perhaps think that Gerier could be a danger to that vision of multi-culturalism that is accepting and Jersey is in fact a very multi-cultural place, we've got quite a big Portuguese community of which that lad was part of there's a big Polish community there's various seasonal workers that come in as well from all kinds of places those two communities are very well established so they've been there for a few generations so they're the biggest but there's quite a wide range there's about 50% of people who live in Jersey are not born there so the idea of creating Gerier for the future that is inclusive is quite crucial to it ever revitalising so what I thought would be good is to talk a little bit about one particular musical example I don't know how we're doing for time but just keep going until you tell me to shut up basically so the example I wanted to play you actually is from the island games opening ceremony and so the island games are a biannual international multi-sports event for small islands organised by the international island games association and the 2015 island games were held in Jersey involving 24 islands and 2700 athletes from around the world the opening ceremony was designed to welcome the athletes to the island with a suitable mix of traditional and celebration of tradition and celebration and will focus on what makes Jersey unique according to the website of the organisers so it was held on the 27th of June 2015 with a live audience of 6000 and several thousand more watching and listening elsewhere and as planned cultural events go in Jersey this was as big as is ever likely to happen in the island it's difficult to ascertain how much of the population engaged with the ceremony and how influential it was but it's certainly significant that most important organisations that are themselves components of local structures of power including government education, police, major local businesses sports and youth clubs and local media put a great deal of emphasis and attention on it as well as resources so both music and gerier were key elements of the ceremony which provides interesting data and raises questions about the current status of music and language in the conscious celebration and construction of Jersey's cultural identity both within local society but also in the representation of that identity to an international audience so by deliberately choosing to signal to the outside world that gerier is integral to the most positive representation of the Jersey identity on an international stage that message then reverberates back very powerfully through the local population it is via the demarcation of the difference to the other that the concept of that difference begins to crystallise in the local psyche forming part of their habitus so the ceremony itself had two main sections the formal and the informal during the formal section the international island games oath was recited first in gerier followed by English and this was followed by a performance of Jersey's Anthem for the Games which is also sung in both gerier and English, more about that song later and after the games were officially declared open the informal part of the ceremony began and Badlabeck performed a 15 minute set the last song was effectively the finale of the event after which the athletes left the park so let me give you a quick description of our performance as an example of the kind of stuff we do so knowing that very few audience members would speak any gerier or recognise our traditional songs our approach was to make the music as accessible as possible using a combination of danceable rhythms familiar pop-folk sounds simple melodic phrases constant musical developments to maintain interest audience interaction and we used two short translated cover versions as well as well known songs that they know as well as our traditional stuff so at a basic level the words form a musical, emotional, performative sound event that theoretically does not need to be understood to be enjoyed there were also two short pauses between the songs in which I could explain a certain amount in English the first song was the song featured in the film actually it's a traditional form which translates as a good sailor drinks while he waits to be sung on the island during bad weather so our version is considerably faster than is usually sung and the high energy works well as a good opener for most gigs the second song was which is one of the oldest regional folk songs we play of anonymous origin with various versions known across Normandy again, our version is up tempo and danceable there's also a key change and a segue into the next song which the crowd would hopefully recognise as the famous pop song I like to move it but translated into gerier which is so that was a bit of fun and then the finale was a real one off for us as a band a sort of real special occasion of which this photo is taken from it was a cover version of the Beatles with a little help from my friends and I had the idea to do this song as soon as we were asked to play at the ceremony my thinking was to involve a choir called Les Amis Les Amis Choir which is actually a choir formed of local adults with learning disabilities and or associated conditions Les Amis the charity help support them and the choir is formed from that charity Les Amis is French for the friends as you may well know so I had attended their Christmas concert in December 2014 and asked them if they'd be willing to perform with us at the games and as a well known singalong song with a positive message of community and friendship both Les Amis and the island games organising committee were happy with the song choice and we focused on getting the choir to learn just the chorus in gerier as you'll hear because I'll play a clip if we can get online the arrangement for the band was fairly similar to the original track with the addition of Les Amis Choir and alongside them was a children's choir the Fleur-de-Lis signing choir and the Jersey Youth Orchestra also joined in so Badlebeck sang the first two verses in geriery accompanied by the choirs for the chorus we then switched to English for the rest of the song and after the final chorus the band vamped on three chords as an outro and the choirs and backing vocals exchanged two alternating phrases in geriery and English and over the top of this I sang all the names of the 24 islands competing at the games ending on Jersey of course with a final flourish from the band I'll play you a few little clips from it so you get an idea ... The feedback on the performance was overwhelmingly favourable the public profile of geriery was raised and by linking the language with a collective celebration of local identity including all the positive community values associated with such an event a monolingual language ideology is inherently though not overtly challenged geriery is put in the limelight via music potentially increasing identification with it as a key element of distinctive local cultural heritage this is true for the audience as well as for the various performers involved the youth orchestra and the choirs and not long after the ceremony I received a thank you letter from Sean Findley the managing director of LISAMI which said it was an amazing experience for all the people involved rest assured the buzz and excitement that has been going round LISAMI in the past week will continue for some time and it is credit to your vision and inspiration to involve adults with learning disabilities and showcasing Jersey as an inclusive island and this showcasing of inclusivity as an aspect of cultural character performed via song that had geriery as a central feature demonstrates how music can act as a conduit of fictive kinship the intention here is the promotion of social cohesion with geriery forming a constitutive part of a non exclusive enactment of community and citizenship such intertwining of music and language with communal solidarity, inclusivity and optimism exemplifies the integration of aesthetics and ethics to the ongoing narrative of cultural identity so the island games opening ceremony is a useful example of how music can contribute to the evolution of language ideology and construction of cultural identity via the representation of the collective self to the other and the echoes from this performance will hopefully continue for some time but what about the future so now I've started my PhD there are three main projects that I'm working on there may be others that will emerge or evolve over the next year or so but we'll see so I'll talk about a little bit about each of those what time am I supposed to finish just to think okay that's fine yeah okay that's good well I'll yeah we're pretty much there so yeah so I've got these three projects and there's also separate to my work there's a digitisation project going on and then there's ongoing schools and community work so our new album I could play you we'll see how we're doing for time but I could play you some clips from the album, some exclusive clips the album's not out yet it's due out in kind of probably September or October time it's a mix of stuff we've got some traditional material on there viva la la viva l'ambo viva l'ambo viva la compagnie we've got our kind of pop folk style stuff on there which sounds a bit more contemporary we've got these cover versions we've actually teamed up with Liz Ami-Quire to record that Beatles song which is going on the album which is great there's a Leonard Cohen cover on there as well there's some interesting remixes which is a bit of an experiment some electro remixes of our stuff which I think will be quite enjoyable there's also a kind of comedy bonus track at the end in fact that's only one minute long so I could play you I could play you that yeah here we go so it's called the title of the track is Jerry A. for Lovers Lesson 1 oh yes we job so there you go that's the closing bonus comedy track on the album so yeah that's the main sort of initial project for the band then the other project that I'm sort of in talks with with the kind of organisers and the jersey and the band and the band the organisers and the jersey education department in particular the music department is a project around liberation day so the 9th of May is a public holiday in jersey known as liberation day which celebrates the long awaited official surrender of the occupying Nazi forces on that day in 1945 and we have a picture of this particular square now known as liberation square in 1945 you can it's a slightly different angle but you can see that it's the same building there in the centre kind of thing so there's always a large scale formal celebration in the capital and Jerry A. is live music is part of it and Jerry A. is part of it in particular focused around a song that you heard me do a sort of a cappella version in the film Montbub to Jerry a very popular song that has become a kind of unofficial of anthem of the island it was the games anthem sung in the island games and it's sung every year on liberation day and I have to skip through some of this basically but essentially the song is performed just before the reenactment of the changing of the flag so they took down the Nazi flags and hung the Jersey flag and the Union Jack I think Union Jack in particular the Jersey flag may have made an appearance so they reenact this every year and just before that they sing this song it's usually performed by one adult perhaps with a back inquire the first verse is in jerry A and then it switches to English so my idea really is to work with the local music department and teach this song to as many local school kids as possible first of all and then draw a choir from across the island that will either perform in the official ceremony or after the ceremony so that's the this year single adult performing the jerry A part and then the choir joins in and the crowd joins in from the English onwards but after the ceremony there's a street party a 1940s themed sort of social event and that's another alternative so I'll perhaps get the children's choir to perform at that and then they can do some English stuff as well and it might be a preferential place to situate that and because then we get two bites of the cherry they'll still perform it formally and then we can do it informally as well ok so the other quick thing is the Jersey song project will facilitate and curate collaborative song writing between generally young local musicians and generally older jerry A speakers leading towards a high profile performance event where the bands will sing their songs they may only have a tiny bit of jerry A but that doesn't matter as long as it's getting that interaction and it's encouraging intergenerational exchange using a buddy system which could then potentially lead towards a sort of master-apprentice style relationship which would be really really good and then the other ongoing work is this digitisation project so it's been initiated by Dr Julia Salabank from here, from SOAS and Dr Murray Jones from Cambridge it's now being led and conducted by a local team with Avril Wells putting that together, coordinating that and then the ongoing schools work that is happening and community work so l'office du jerry A are working away at that they've currently got four teachers although one's going to retire at some point pretty soon and they've also kind of got the tentative approval from the local government to get two more teachers trained up obviously they all have to become fluent enough in jerry A to then teach that's a bit of a process but the plan has now been submitted and approved so it's just a matter of finding the money for it basically so that's ongoing work so to conclude essentially I have proposed that as a unique way of experiencing the ongoing negotiation of individual and collective identity music offers a realm of interaction through which communities can shift language ideology and reconstruct a cultural identity that embraces the endangered language in a deep way the proactive application of a constructivist approach through music necessarily involves an appreciation of aesthetics from an ethnomusicological perspective but whilst there is great potential here there is also complexity and risk requiring research sensitivity in order to avoid the dangers of top down political manipulation paternalism and maybe even problematic forms of nationalism careful research and evaluation is needed the other important point to remember is that popularity does not equal revitalisation it's definitely been a shift in recent years of local attitudes but there's still a very long way to go and whilst few people in jerry these days would be happy to see jerry disappear completely there remains a certain inertia perhaps even an ambivalence toward converting this positive attitude into genuine revitalisation which takes proactive engagement patience, diligence and perseverance beyond just listening to a pop band singing Beatles covers and the language is still critically endangered and there is no guarantee it will survive more than another decade or two as Julia Salabank wrote overtly expressed attitudes are not actions positive attitudes cannot save a language without concrete measures so maybe it is here that the co-implication of music, language and cultural identity has its deepest value applied ethnomusicology projects engaging in language activism will need to achieve a balance that is both realistic about the challenges and complexities and optimistic about the potential for positive outcomes but in shaping identity a course may be set for the future to some degree the chance that language activism is likely to succeed in the long run can be measured by the extent to which it etches its message into the core elements of collective identity this core serves as a touchstone for credible and lasting interventions so I have some questions for you that's basically it for my talk but what would be really interesting is to get perspective from you guys obviously and in particular thinking about other work, research or concepts or revitalisation strategies that I should be aware of but also thinking about how you think I might be able to evidence change I'm doing ethnography as I work but are there any measures or ways of evidenting these changes and the effectiveness of these musical interventions and then just any other questions or critiques that you guys have been more than welcome Thank you very much I do have a question about in the film you showed that little discussion you had with the students I just noticed so they don't speak German and ok so I just found it interesting that I've read the questionnaire your questionnaire was all written in English or asking questions or in English but I just thought in a way that while you were saying that language it's really important to encourage people's finger but you were using English but I didn't understand it was because they couldn't understand because they couldn't understand so do they like children some children they do seem like oh yeah it is important important for us but do they have any any access to language classes or anything like that Not a lot at the moment because it's fairly under resourced ultimately there's a in all the state schools so that's you know the kind of most of the schools not all the private ones but the state schools have an introduction to the language or of primary and it's literally at the moment I think one term it's very very minimal it gives them a flavour and from there then there are at the moment there are some voluntary after school clubs and some lunchtime things I think but it's pretty tough right now because of that reason having said that the general attitudes across the community is improving and there are some good initiatives on that front and also this new language plan will change the amount of engagement they can have so it will have I think they're planning something like certainly more opportunities so they would get taught across three years they're also planning an introduction very early on to like an infant level and they are if it goes through there'll be like a language officer full time to do community engagement and provide external stuff outside of schools so hopefully as things progress there'll be more opportunity but at the moment it's really really minimal and that's why things like having Badalabek out there doing gigs and selling CDs is a positive thing because it's one other way to engage young people but I also agree with you when you say being popular doesn't mean that the revitalization work has done I think also like you said the language plan that they're going to do more things because if you just if they're interested in music interested in the lyrics but other than that they don't really have any other things to build up the recovery absolutely any daily interaction other than just singing songs that are provided by you I think it's a long way to go very long way I really like the idea of bringing young people to engage them with music I think it's very interesting I really like that idea yeah thanks it should be fun to see how these other projects go and how involved the kids get basically because with mine I was trying to use these books to get kids interested they are more interested in TV shows I mean to me it's almost impossible at the moment to provide any TV shows in their language so it's really difficult music wise I can't do it myself but it could be a good way for sure do you have any questions we can also just carry on the discussion down the pub can I ask you a question before I forget it was there any resistance from the schools in terms of this language learning taking up courage in a time which I felt forget what the students thought the teachers was there any resistance yeah I don't know all the details but I'm pretty sure there was some there was definitely a debate in the states the states of Jersey whether the funding should actually be cut and it should be sort of deprioritised thankfully that was reversed and it's not being cut you know they're pledging to do more but certainly some of the private schools just not up for it they've got Spanish and German and Chinese important things for their kids future to learn so they just don't want to provide that option but because the government schools are able to roll out just kind of in a compulsory way so I don't know whether in terms of teachers etc. there was any resistance it seems to have gone down pretty well and like I say because the community on the whole is these days more positive and doesn't want to see it disappear they're happy to have it in their schools so yeah that's cool you as a kind of sort of cultural marker type thing yeah yeah but that's the realities we've got to look at absolutely and I can't say for sure because I'm not in Lofi's and I haven't been directly involved with the language plan but obviously it is key to be realistic about what kind of goals are achievable I've been involved with this for five years and I'm still a long way from fluent because it's really hard to learn Jere sort of back and forth to London but yeah you can't have that immersive experience that you can have if you just go to France or something for a few months so fluency is a really difficult thing to achieve and it's a major question for how how it can possibly survive this generation or so passing in that respect do you think the current method of measuring the language acquisition and the skill is necessarily appropriate for Jersey yeah how it's going yeah no again it's a really good point there's been a believe it or not a GCSE Jere on offer for a few years no one's ever one person's taken it and they failed so yeah you know I'm building up wasn't me I'm building up towards taking it I should take it but yeah so it's a tough one absolutely what you're aiming at how you measure it how you build towards it all good excellent well I'm sure we'll keep talking we can all keep talking we'll go to the pub thank you