  jÃ¨rriais is the form of the norman language spoken in jersey, in the channel islands, off the coast of france. it has been in decline over the past century as english has increasingly become the language of education, commerce and administration. there are very few people who speak jÃ¨rriais as a mother tongue and, owing to the age of the remaining speakers, their numbers decrease annually. despite this, efforts are being made to keep the language alive. a similar language, guernÃ©siais is spoken in neighbouring guernsey; the language of sark, sercquiais, is a descendant of the jÃ¨rriais brought by the jersey colonists who settled sark in the 16th century; and there is mutual intelligibility with the norman language of mainland normandy. jÃ¨rriais is often called "jersey french" or "jersey norman french" in english (though this may give the impression that the language is a dialect of french) and "jersiais" or "normand de jersey" in french. jÃ¨rriais is distinct from the jersey legal french used for legal contracts, laws and official documents by the government and administration of jersey. for this reason, some prefer using the term "jersey norman" to avoid ambiguity and to disassociate the language from standard french. ==status== thumb|jersey airport greets travellers with welcome to jersey in jÃ¨rriais  the latest figures come from the jersey annual social survey issued on 5 december 2012.http://www.gov.je/sitecollectiondocuments/government%20and%20administration/r%20jass2012%2020121204%20su.pdf the survey of 4200 households took place in june 2012 and resulted in 2400 returns. it showed that 18% of the population could speak some jÃ¨rriais words and phrases with more than 7% of those over 65 being fluent or able to speak a lot of jÃ¨rriais. two-thirds of adults said that they could not understand spoken jÃ¨rriais, but more than a quarter are able to understand some, and 5% more can usually or fully understand someone speaking jÃ¨rriais. 4% of people said that the
Dialects_with_Linguist_List_code Endangered_Romance_languages Jersey Languages_of_Europe Languages_without_ISO_639-3_code_but_with_Linguasphere_code Norman_language