Dò bon djé
Neuchâtel patois
Said in the canton of Neuchâtel
Hello
Dò bon djé
Where it comes from
Dò bon djé is bonjour, preceded by a little word that French does not have. According to the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande, this dò went with greetings addressed to someone you call vous, or to a whole group. It was said in La Brévine, in the Montagnes, in the Val-de-Ruz and here and there in the Vignoble; other forms turn up in the Jura and in a few villages of Vaud. The Glossaire writes it dò bondjœ, in its phonetic notation; the game writes it as three words.
What does this dò mean? In 1904 the Bulletin du Glossaire reported the mountain people’s explanation: two bonjours, dò as in “deux”, two. It found this rather far-fetched and leaned, without being sure, towards a piece of the verb donner, “to give”, fused with “vous”, the trace of a wish addressed to God: originally, it recalled, every greeting was a wish. The Glossaire later goes the same way. For the Glossaire, don is probably the subjunctive of donner, as in “Dieu vous donne bonjour”, God give you good day, and the n was lost because of the nasal sound of the bon that follows it. A Neuchâtel text from 1781 already uses it.
Neuchâtel patois fell silent soon afterwards: according to Wikipedia, its last speakers died out during the 1920s. A few enthusiasts have kept it alive since, without it being passed down in families.
In use
Rather than invent sentences in a patois no longer spoken at home, here are the two other greetings that the 1904 Bulletin records with dò in the Neuchâtel Montagnes:
- “Dò bon vépr!” – Good evening! (literally, in French “bon vêpre”: good vespers)
- “Dò bouna né!” – Good night!
Sources: Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande, “don” (volume V, p. 848) and “bonjour” (volume II, p. 490); Bulletin du Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande, “Les salutations dans les patois romands” (1904); French Wikipedia, “Neuchâtelois”.