Cotentinais (; le normand du Cotentin) is the variety of the Norman language spoken on the Cotentin Peninsula, in the Manche department of Normandy, France. Together with Cauchois in the east, it is one of the best-preserved mainland forms of Norman. It belongs to the northern group of Norman, spoken north and west of the Joret line, and is closely related to the insular Norman of the Channel Islands (Jèrriais and Guernésiais).
Like Norman generally, Cotentinais descends from the Gallo-Romance speech of Neustria, overlaid from the 10th century with a Norse element left by Scandinavian settlers, which is especially visible in its maritime and rural vocabulary. After the incorporation of continental Normandy into the French crown in 1204 and the later standardisation of French, Norman declined to the status of a spoken patois; a literary revival began in the Cotentin in the later 19th century. The language is today classified as severely endangered, with transmission largely broken and its survival dependent on cultural associations.
Name The dialect is named after the Cotentin, the peninsula that forms the northern part of the Manche. The name of the region derives ultimately from the city of Coutances (Latin Constantia; the surrounding district was the pagus Constantinus), whose older French form Costentin was used by the 12th-century Norman poet Wace.
Classification
Cotentinais is a dialect of Norman, itself a langue d'oïl within the Gallo-Romance branch of the Romance languages. Norman is conventionally divided into insular Norman, spoken in the Channel Islands, and continental or mainland Norman; the continental dialects are in turn separated by the Joret line into a northern group (also called the domaine normanno-picard) and a southern group. Cotentinais belongs to the northern group and therefore shares its defining features with Cauchois in the Pays de Caux and with the insular varieties, from which it is separated only by the sea. The southern Norman of the Avranchin and the Orne, by contrast, is transitional towards Gallo and the dialects of Maine.
Geographic distribution and sub-dialects Cotentinais is spoken across the Cotentin, essentially the northern two-thirds of the Manche. The Joret line runs across the base of the peninsula, from around Granville towards Villedieu-les-Poêles and eastward through the bocage, so that nearly all of the Cotentin proper lies within the conservative northern zone.
There is no standardised written form of Norman, and descriptions of the internal variation of Cotentinais are impressionistic rather than the result of a single agreed classification. Local speech is usually grouped by pays: the Haguais of La Hague in the north-west, noted for its strongly guttural aspirated h; the parler of the Val de Saire in the north-east; the Coutançais around Coutances; and the Baupteis of the marshland around Bauptois, between Carentan and La Haye-du-Puits. The dialectologist René Lepelley, who made the fullest modern study of the Val de Saire, regarded that district and La Hague as among the most conservative Norman parlers anywhere in Normandy. The urban speech of Cherbourg is effectively extinct.
Linguistic features The Joret line The single most important feature setting Cotentinais apart from standard French is the absence of the palatalisation described by the Joret line, an isogloss first traced by Charles Joret in 1883. It is in fact a bundle of related sound-correspondences. North of the line, Latin and before remain unpalatalised, where French has and :
Latin / etymon Cotentinais French English cattus cat chat cat caldaria caudière chaudière cauldron gamba gambe jambe leg gardinus gardin jardin garden *captiare cachi chasser to hunt / chase
The same conservatism accounts for a number of Norman-derived words in English, such as cat, candle, catch, cauldron and garden, which entered English from Norman rather than central French. Two further isoglosses in the bundle give for Latin before front vowels where French has (chent for cent "hundred", rachine for racine "root"), and for Germanic where French has (viquet for guichet "wicket", vêpe for guêpe "wasp").
Phonology Cotentinais shares several conservative features of the wider "Grand Ouest". Latin stressed free gives rather than the French (mé "me", dret "right", fei "faith"), and Latin and give (coue "tail", goule "mouth, gob"). A consonant followed by is palatalised (kios for clos "enclosure", pieum for plume "feather"), and in the north-west the sequence advances to (cachi "to hunt", muchi "to hide"). The nasal vowels and are strongly and closely articulated.
The dialect preserves a markedly aspirated, sometimes guttural, , at its strongest in La Hague, whose name is pronounced ; the same pronunciation was formerly heard much further east, surviving around Honfleur into the early 20th century. Scholars are divided over whether the aspiration reflects the Germanic (Frankish and Norse) settlement or later contact with English in the Anglo-Norman period.
Several outcomes vary across the peninsula, one of the clearest markers of its internal division. The group written -ien reduces to in the Nord-Cotentin, where byin "well" is pronounced and quyin "dog" , but keeps a nasal vowel elsewhere; -aun is roughly (maunté "coat") except in the Centre-Cotentin around Carentan, Portbail and Périers, where it is ; -oun is a long (quétoun "donkey"); and the indefinite article eun "a" is (eun cat "a cat"). Unaccented final e is silent, and in connected speech the plural article merges with a following vowel (les houmes "the men" is pronounced roughly ).
Vocabulary and the Norse element The most distinctive part of the Cotentinais lexicon is the layer of words inherited from the Old Norse of the Scandinavian settlers, concentrated in the vocabulary of the sea, the coast and the land. Examples include:
Cotentinais Meaning Old Norse etymon mielle sand dune melr hougue, hogue mound, hillock haugr hague enclosure, rough pasture hagi grunne underwater shoal grunnr écore steep bank skorr falle bird's crop, gullet falr super to sip, drink supa viquet wicket-gate (Germanic) houle hollow or sea-cave in the rocks hol ber rock, reef berg estran foreshore, tidal strand strönd vraic seaweed gathered for manure (Germanic)
The maritime and rural vocabulary of Norse origin has been the subject of dedicated study, and the grammatical gender assigned to these Norse loanwords in Norman was analysed by Albert Sjögren. The same Norse stratum is visible in Cotentin place-names, in elements such as -tot (a homestead, from topt), -bec (a stream, from bekkr), -hou and -homme (an islet, from holmr) and -dal (a valley, from dalr). Alongside the Norse layer, Cotentinais keeps many words of the wider Grand Ouest and of Old French that have vanished from standard French; conversely, a number of words now felt to be ordinary French, such as itou ("likewise"), were themselves borrowed from Norman.
Morphology Like the rest of Norman, Cotentinais nouns have two genders, masculine and feminine, and no case inflection. A widespread Norman trait is the use of the subject pronoun nos for the first person plural, conjugated like the third person singular. Verbs have infinitives in -er and -i (cachi "to hunt", muchi "to hide"), and a characteristic haplology affects common interrogatives, so that avez-vous ("do you have") becomes avous and voulez-vous ("do you want") becomes voulous. As generally in the langues d'oïl, negation may be reinforced by a noun denoting a small quantity: besides ne...pas, Cotentinais uses ne...mie and ne...mèche, and the emphatic ne...pièche ("not at all", literally "not a scrap"), which in some local speech extends to the sense "nothing" or "no one".
Verbs Verbs are grouped by their infinitive ending, chiefly -er and -i (happer "to catch", muchi "to hide"). In the normalised spelling many first-conjugation infinitives are written -aer, a convention for an ending pronounced differently from one district to another, so that acataer "to buy" is realised [akato] in the Val de Saire and [akatâé] in the Coutançais. The subject pronouns are je "I", tu "you", i "he" (il before a vowel), o "she" (ol before a vowel), no (the indefinite "one", also used for "we"), vos "you" (plural) and i/o "they"; characteristically for Norman, the first person plural is expressed with je together with a plural verb ending, so that je soumes means "we are" and j'avouns "we have". The present indicative of the two auxiliaries is:
Person yête ("to be") aveir ("to have") 1st singular je sis j'i 2nd singular t'es t'as 3rd singular il / ol est il / ol a 1st plural je soumes j'avouns 2nd plural vos êtes vos avaez 3rd plural il / ol sount il / ol ount
Fuller conjugations, in the imperfect, preterite, future, conditional and subjunctive, appear in teaching materials and community grammars, but no complete paradigm specific to Cotentinais, as distinct from Norman generally, has been established in the scholarly literature.
Orthography Norman has never possessed a single traditional orthography, and 19th-century authors each spelled the language in their own way. From the late 1940s the Cotentin scholar Fernand Lechanteur devised a "normalised" spelling (orthographe normalisée) for continental Norman. Its purpose was not to merge the various parlers into one standard but to supply consistent, rationalised conventions within which each locality could still be read in its own pronunciation and retain its own words. Three standardised orthographies are in use today: the Lechanteur system for continental Norman, including Cotentinais; the spelling of the Jèrriais dictionaries (Le Maistre, 1966; Société Jersiaise, 2005); and the Guernésiais spelling of the De Garis dictionary (1982).
Examples The phrases below illustrate the dialect, with a standard-French equivalent and an English gloss.
Greetings and courtesy: Boujou, Byin le bouojou (French bonjour, bien le bonjour): "hello", "good day to you".
Sayings and proverbs: L'amour ch'est coume la gale, cha peut paé s'muchi (French l'amour, c'est comme la gale, ça ne peut pas se cacher): "love is like the itch, it cannot be hidden". Quaund il plleut, ch'est sène de mâovais temps (French quand il pleut, c'est signe de mauvais temps): "when it rains, it is a sign of bad weather". Broussins dauns les avents, byin des poumes ès Normaunds (French du crachin pendant l'avent, beaucoup de pommes pour les Normands): "drizzle in Advent, plenty of apples for the Normans".
The features of the Joret line can be heard in a sentence such as marchez trachier la pouque (French allez chercher le sac, "go and fetch the sack"), which keeps the verb trachier "to fetch" and the unpalatalised velar of pouque "sack"; compare the pairs cat (chat "cat"), vaque (vache "cow"), quyin (chien "dog"), câté (château "castle") and vêpe (guêpe "wasp").
History Norman took shape when the Old Norse-speaking settlers who founded the Duchy of Normandy from 911 adopted the Gallo-Romance speech of the country, adding to it a superstrate of Norse words together with some Old English elements along the coast. Norse is reported to have survived on the Norman coast into the 12th century. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the dialect was carried to England as Anglo-Norman, but the loss of continental Normandy to the French crown in 1204, and the growing prestige of the French of Paris, gradually reduced Norman to an unwritten regional patois.