Sarkese

A few miles off the coast of Normandy lies the Channel Island of Sark. Just 3.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide, the island is only accessible by boat and cars are banned on the island. There is no public lighting and it remained the last feudal state in Europe until democracy arrived in 2008. Like the rest of the Channel Islands, it is a British Crown Dependency and today English is very much the lingua franca. Yet, for centuries, the language spoken on the island was its own native dialect, Sarkese.

This dialect has its historical roots in Norman French, which you might not be surprised to hear was the version of French spoken by the Normans. These people were Norse Vikings who came from modern-day Scandinavia and arrived in an area of northern France, then known as Neustria, in the tenth century. This territory would in time become Normandy and the mixing of these North Germanic tribes with the local population gave birth to the language Norman French, a welding of Old French and Old Norse.

The Viking raiders established their partnership with West Francia to form the Duchy of Normandy, which included the Channel Islands. From here they would go on to conquer areas of the British Isles and Italy. A date that everyone knows is 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England and seized power. With their arrival came another joining of two languages, forming Anglo-Norman.

Although this language had largely died out in the mainland of the United Kingdom by 1400, a sister branch of Norman French would end up being preserved and spoken for another 600 years in the relative isolation of the Channel Islands. The Norman legacy can be found in the names of Jersey and Guernsey, with the -ey suffix coming from the Old Norse word for island.

From Jersey, around 40 families settled on the previously uninhabited island of Sark in 1565, bringing with them their own dialect of Jèrriais which would evolve into Sarkese. At the end of the eighteenth century, there was reportedly not a single English speaker on the island but this began to change in 1835, when Cornish tin miners started to arrive. These newcomers brought with them their language from the mainland, ending the isolated use of Sarkese. After World War One, the church and school (yes, there was only one of each on the whole island) started using English as the lingua franca, further eroding the use of the island’s native dialect.

Today, only a handful of the island’s population of around 500 people are native speakers of Sarkese. There has been a push to preserve its use but it is quite a complex language to learn, containing around 50 vowels and remains more closely tied to the archaic features of the Norman language compared to Jèrriais. Its future is very precarious but it serves as another reminder of the Norman influence on the British Isles.