Cotentinais

Cotentinais (French pronunciation: [kɔtɑ̃tinɛ]; 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. 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. 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.