INCREASING numbers of children taking part in the Eisteddfod’s Jèrriais section testify to a resurgence of interest in the Island’s native language, according to the man who led the Jèrriais teaching team for 20 years.
Tony Scott Warren, who now lives with his wife Celia in Howden in Yorkshire’s East Riding, was back in St Ouen’s Parish Hall – a stronghold of the Jèrriais language – to judge one of the largest entries for the annual competition.
More than 250 children are taking part, adding to entrants in the adult classes, a sign of the success of the expansion of the teaching team which is now part of the Education Department, he believes.
“I think it’s fantastic. I really do. We were trying to build up a system but now that they have got a proper number of staff and a proper level of funding, what they are doing is really motoring with the language and I think that’s fantastic.
“It shows how popular it has become and the progress they are making. It’s terrific and it’s wonderful to see that what we did to set the scene and start the process is making such big strides now,” he said.
Invited back to Jersey last year to sit as the assistant to former St Ouen Constable Ken Vibert, Mr Scott Warren is here this year in his own right as the adjudicator, assisted by Peter Germain, from whom he first learned the language almost 40 years ago. It is certainly unusual, he noted, for a Jèrriais adjudicator to come from outside the Island but it allows younger students to present their work to a fresh pair of eyes and ears.
“In the adult classes I’ll know people like Ken and Jean [Le Maistre] but I probably don’t know many of the adult students now either,” he said.
During his time back in the Island, Mr Scott Warren was taking the opportunity to join informal Jèrriais conversation groups, and to meet former colleagues Geraint Jennings and Colin Ireson.
Based in Yorkshire, Mr Scott Warren acknowledges that there are limited opportunities to use the language, largely confined to social-media postings and to occasional opportunities to transcribe old texts from the Evening Post and Chronique de Jersey. Much of his time – unexpectedly, he explained – has been devoted to the church where he has become an authorised lay minister, typically leading two services a week and helping sustain the life of six churches in area surrounding his Howden home.
But his passion for Jèrriais remains strong and his delight in the evident progress made in recent years allows him to look at the potential with new optimism.
“I always use the Isle of Man as our pattern or example to follow, and what I found wonderful when I went there quite a few years ago was going into a secondary school and finding students who were using Manx as their preferred language of conversation – small numbers but they were doing it spontaneously, if you like.
“That’s what I want to see for Jèrriais and I think it’s starting to happen. I’ve got a couple of girls who started learning Jèrriais with me eight or nine years ago who are still doing it now and have the enthusiasm for it. That’s the way it’s going to move forward,” he said.
