The Martin Manuscript: An Unexplored Archive of Guernsey Norman French

Although the Channel Islands have formed part of the Romance-speaking world for some two millennia, they are unlikely to do so for much longer. In 2001, Census figures revealed that, in Guernsey, only some 2% of the population (or 1327 individuals) could still speak Guernsey Norman French (Guernesiais). The hitherto-unstudied Martin manuscript is the largest corpus of prose from a single pen in Channel Island French. Dating from the turn of the twentieth century, it consists of 295 exercise-books which contain a complete translation into Guernesiais of the Bible and of 100 plays from the work of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Pierre and Thomas Corneille, Molière and Voltaire. The manuscript's extensive nature means that, after the death of the last native speaker, it will represent one of the most important sources of data available on the dialect. This paper examines Martin's translation of the Gospel according to St Mark. It investigates possible sources of the translation, the orthographic system used, lexical features such as regionalisms, the use of register and borrowings, and ends by considering the way in which the translations can offer an unprecedented insight into late nineteenth/early twentieth century Guernesiais and provide new morphosyntactic and lexical data on the dialect.