The Jersey Song Project, a groundbreaking collaboration between the Jersey Festival of Words and Jèrriais expert and musician Kit Ashton, aims to use the power of song to keep the threatened Norman-French dialect alive.
Jersey musicians and Jèrriais speakers will be encouraged to get together to create new songs that will be performed at the opening event of the Jersey Festival of Words 2018 on 26 September.
The compositions can be on any theme and in any genre or language, but must include at least one word of Jèrriais.
The Jersey Song Project is led by Mr Ashton, whose Jèrriais band Badlabecques have done much to revitalise the Island’s language through concerts and recordings. It will form part of his research towards a doctorate from Goldsmiths, University of London, on how music can help endangered languages.
The 26 September performance will be filmed for YouTube and the organisers hope new songs generated by the project will be good enough to keep being sung into the future.
‘I am really excited to be launching this project with the Jersey Festival of Words, though I’m a little nervous as it really depends on the creative involvement of the community – anything could happen,’ said Mr Ashton.
‘Jèrriais is a critically endangered language and, unless the people of Jersey revitalise it, it could disappear from our culture altogether.
‘Music is one of the most powerful ways to keep a language alive, so we are hoping for some really interesting new music to come out of this process.’
Musicians and Jèrriais speakers interested in joining the Jersey Song Project are invited to contact him at kit@kitashton.com. Participants will be helped either by collaborating with some of the remaining speakers of the language, by setting an existing text to music, or by translating their own lyrics. Help will be available at every stage from Mr Ashton and the Education Department’s L’Office du Jèrriais.
Providing a showcase for Jersey’s history, heritage and language has been one of the guiding principles of the Jersey Festival of Words since its launch in 2015.
Festival vice-chairman Paul Bisson – himself a musician and teacher – said: ‘Kit Ashton, Badlabecques and L’Office du Jèrriais have done fantastic work in recent years to reignite interest in our native language and its rich literary tradition. We are proud to be working with Kit in this new project, which will create a unique and very fitting opening event for the whole festival.’ As well as the Jersey Song Project, this year’s festival will include the launch of a translation into Jèrriais of Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury’s children’s classic, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
The book will be presented to every child starting at primary school in September, with the aim of sparking interest among the young while also giving parents an incentive to learn some of the language.
The fourth Jersey Festival of Words takes place from Wednesday 26 September to Sunday 30 September.
