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East Anglian English

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East Anglian English
East Anglian
RegionEast Anglia and Essex
EthnicityEast Anglians
Early form
Dialects
English alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-3–
Glottologsout3285
IETFen-u-sd-gbnfk
Red areas are the commonly agreed upon areas in East Anglia of Norfolk and Suffolk. The pink areas are the areas that are not always agreed upon by scholars containing Essex and Cambridgeshire.

East Anglian English is a dialect of English spoken in East Anglia, primarily in or before the mid-20th century. East Anglian English has had a very considerable input into modern Estuary English, which has largely replaced it. However, it has received little attention from the media and is not easily recognised by people from other parts of the United Kingdom. East Anglia is not easily defined and its boundaries are not uniformly agreed upon.[1]

The Fens were traditionally an uninhabited area that was difficult to cross, so there was little dialect contact between the two sides of the Fens.[2]

Sub-dialects that linguist Peter Trudgill specify include:[1]

  • Norfolk dialect (Broad Norfolk)
  • Suffolk dialect
  • Essex dialect
  • Cambridgeshire dialect
  • Fenland dialect

History

In Jacek Fisiak's and Peter Trudgill's book, East Anglian English, they describe the important influence East Anglian English has had on the development of the English language. In addition to its influence in the Standard English that is known today all around England, there is evidence according to Oxford Dictionary that East Anglian English grammar was heard in North Carolina.[3]

Very little is known about the Anglo-Saxon East Anglian dialect; a Suffolk charter (of Æthelflæd, before 991) is included in Sweet (1946:188–89). S. L. Bensusan set out to record elements of the East Anglian dialect and records a statement made by a local when she caught him making notes on the sleeve of his shirt: "Whatever you bin makin' them little owd squiggles on y'r cuff fower?" Bensusan replied that he was "writing history". He then recorded her retort: "You dedn't wanter done that. Telly f'r why. When you've got y'r shirt washed there won't be nawthen left. I've never wrote nawthen all me born days, ne yet me husban', an he got all his teeth an' I kin thread me needle without spectacles. Folk don't wanter write in this world, they wanter do a job o' work."[4]

Grammar

  • Third-person singular zero is the lack of -s in third-person verb conjugations and is considered as the "best-known dialect feature" of East Anglian English. Examples include "she go" or "that say".[5]
  • Use of the word do with the meaning of or, or else ,[3] for example "You better go to bed now, do you’ll be tired in the morning"[3]
  • That is used in place of central pronoun it, e.g. "that's cloudy", "that's hot out there" and "that book, that's okay, I like it".[6] The final example still uses it, but only when it is the object of a verb.[3] The word that usually denotes it when it is the subject of the clause, so that "it is" becomes "that is" and "it smells funny" becomes "that smell funny".[7] This does not imply emphatic usage as it would in Standard English and indeed sentences such as "When that rain, we get wet", are entirely feasible in the dialect. (Incidentally, it is almost never heard as the first word of a sentence in the speech of a true Norfolk dialect speaker, e.g. "It's a nice day today" is virtually always rendered by "Thass a nice day today".)
  • Time is used to mean while, for example, "You sit down, time I get dinner ready."[3]
  • Now can also mean just, i.e. "I am now leaving" also means "I am just leaving".[6]
  • Some verbs conjugate differently in Norfolk or Suffolk. The past tense of 'show', for example is 'shew',[8] and of the verb to snow, 'snew', swam becomes 'swum'. The past of drive is 'driv'. e.g. 'I driv all the way to Yarmouth, and on the way back that snew.' 'Sang' is always 'sung' ('She sung out of tune'), and 'stank' is always 'stunk' ('After they had mucked out the pigs their clothes stunk'). Many verbs simply have no past tense, and use the present form. e.g. 'Come', 'say' and 'give'. 'When my husband come home, he say he give tuppence for a loaf of bread' meaning 'When he came home, he said, he gave tuppence...'. This even applies to a verb like 'go'. 'Every time they go to get the needle out, it moved'.[9] Verbs whose past participles differ from their active past tenses e.g. 'spoken', are mostly ignored in Norfolk. e.g. 'If you were clever you were spoke to more often by the teacher', or 'If I hadn't went up to Mousehold that night'.[10]
  • The present participle, or ...ing, form of the verb, such as running, writing etc. is mostly rendered in the Middle English form of 'a-running', 'a-jumping' etc. 'She's a-robbing me'.[11]

Vocabulary

  • bishybarnybee – a ladybird[3]
  • dag – dew[3]
  • dene – the sandy area by the coast[3]
  • dickey – the local term to refer to a donkey;[3] note that the word 'donkey' appears only to have been in use in English since the late 18th century.[12] The Oxford English Dictionary quotes 'dicky' as one of the alternative slang terms for an ass.
  • directly ("as soon as" or "immediately"), as in "Directly they got their money on Friday nights, the women would get the suits out of the pawn shop"[13]
  • dodman – a term used to refer to a snail[3]
  • dow – a pigeon[3]
  • dwile – floorcloth[3]
  • gays – the pictures printed on a book or a newspaper[3]
  • grup – refers to a small trench[3]
  • hutkin – used for a finger protecter[3]
  • mawkin – a scarecrow[3]
  • mawther – local word referring to a girl or young woman[3]
  • pit – a pond[3]
  • push – a boil or pimple[3]
  • quant – punt pole[3]
  • ranny – term meaning 'shrew'[3]
  • sowpig – a woodlouse[3]
  • staithe – an archaic term still used to reference any landing stage[3]
  • stroop – the throat[3]
  • ar ya reet bor? (are you all right neighbour, in Norfolk)[14]

Accent

Phonetics

This section contains phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. For the distinction between [ ], / / and ⟨ ⟩, see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters.

Phonological features frequently heard throughout the area include:

  • Yod-dropping after alveolar consonants (/t, d, s, z, n, l/) is found in many English accents, and widely in American pronunciation, so that words like "tune", "due", "sue", "new" are pronounced /tuːn/, /duː/, /suː/, /nuː/, sounding like "toon", "doo", "soo", "noo". Additionally, in East Anglia, yod-dropping is found universally, and this seems to be unique. Yod-dropping therefore happens after all consonants, so that RP [Cjuː] is pronounced as Norfolk [Cuː] (where C stands for any consonant). For example, "beautiful", "few", "huge", "accuse" have pronunciations that sound like "bootiful",[15] "foo", "hooge", "akooz". A parallel case involves the vowel of CURE: in RP the word is pronounced with initial /kj/, but Norfolk speakers omit the /j/ and smoothing results in /ɜː/ so that "cure" sounds like "cur".[16][17]*
  • Absence of h-dropping.[18]
  • /ɜː/ as in first pronounced [fɐst].[19]
  • /ʊ/ as in stone [stʊn][20]
  • BATH/PALM/START is a very front vowel unlike London English, where it is a back vowel[20]
  • /p, k/ in intervocalic positions are glottalized as in paper or baker, [ˈpæip̬ʔə, ˈbæik̬ʔə]. This is also the case with /t/, later [ˈlæit̬ʔə], but is more commonly completely replaced by a full stop, i.e. [ˈlæiʔə].[21]
  • Words containing /aʊ/ sounds (as in 'ouch!') have a more fronted or raised nucleus than many other English dialects.[22]

In addition to the above phonological features, East Anglian English also has a distinct rhythm. This is due to the loss of unstressed syllables associated with East Anglian speakers.[21]

Prosody

There appears to be no agreed framework for describing the prosodic characteristics of different dialects (see Intonation). Writing in 1889, the phonetician Alexander John Ellis began his section on East Anglian speech with these comments:

Every one has heard of the [Norfolk] 'drant', or droning and drawling in speech, and the [Suffolk] 'whine,' but they are neither of them points which can be properly brought under consideration here, because intonation has been systematically neglected, as being impossible to symbolise satisfactorily, even in the rare cases where it could be studied.[23]

There does appear to be agreement that the Norfolk accent has a distinctive rhythm due to some stressed vowels being longer than their equivalents in RP and some unstressed vowels being much shorter.[24][25] Claims that Norfolk speech has intonation with a distinctive "lilt" lack robust empirical evidence.

Portrayal

The treatment of the Norfolk dialect in the television drama All the King's Men in 1999 in part prompted the foundation of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect (FOND), a group formed with the aim of preserving and promoting Broad Norfolk.[citation needed]

Arnold Wesker's 1958 play Roots used Norfolk dialect.[citation needed]

During the 1960s, Anglia Television produced a soap opera called "Weavers Green" which used local characters making extensive use of Norfolk dialect. The programme was filmed at the "cul-de-sac" village of Heydon north of Reepham in mid Norfolk.

An example of the Norfolk accent and vocabulary can be heard in the songs by Allan Smethurst, aka The Singing Postman. Smethurst's Norfolk accent is well known from his releases of the 1960s, such as "Hev Yew Gotta Loight Bor?". The Boy John Letters of Sidney Grapes, which were originally published in the Eastern Daily Press, are another valid example of the Norfolk dialect. Beyond simply portrayers of speech and idiom however, Smethurst, and more especially Grapes, record their authentic understanding of mid-20th century Norfolk village life. Grapes' characters, the Boy John, Aunt Agatha, Granfar, and Ole Missus W, perform a literary operetta celebrating down-to-earth ordinariness over bourgeois affectation and pretence.

Charles Dickens had some grasp of the Norfolk accent which he utilised in the speech of the Yarmouth fishermen, Ham and Daniel Peggoty in David Copperfield. Patricia Poussa analyses the speech of these characters in her article Dickens as Sociolinguist.[26] She makes connections between Scandinavian languages and the particular variant of Norfolk dialect spoken in the Flegg area around Great Yarmouth, a place of known Viking settlement. Significantly, the use of 'that' meaning 'it', is used as an example of this apparent connection.

The publication in 2006 by Ethel George (with Carole and Michael Blackwell) of The Seventeenth Child provides a written record of spoken dialect, though in this case of a person brought up inside the city of Norwich. Ethel George was born in 1914, and in 2006 provided the Blackwells with extensive tape-recorded recollections of her childhood as the seventeenth offspring of a relatively poor Norwich family. Carole Blackwell has reproduced a highly literal written rendering of this.[27]

An erudite and comprehensive study of the dialect, by Norfolk native and professor of sociolinguistics Peter Trudgill can be found in his book The Norfolk Dialect (2003), published as part of the 'Norfolk Origins' series by Poppyland Publishing, Cromer.

See also

References

  1. ^ a b Trudgill (2001).
  2. ^ Trudgill, Peter; Fisiak, Jacek (2001). East Anglian English. Boydell & Brewer. p. 220. ISBN 9780859915717.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x Trudgill, Peter. "East Anglian English". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 18 March 2018.
  4. ^ Bensusan (1949).
  5. ^ Trudgill (2001), p. 1.
  6. ^ a b Trudgill (2001), p. 2.
  7. ^ "Speaking the Norfolk dialect: Advanced Level". Archived from the original on 19 December 2009. Retrieved 18 July 2009.
  8. ^ see George 2006, p. 97.
  9. ^ George 2006, p. 155.
  10. ^ George 2006, p. 190.
  11. ^ see George 2006, p. 75.
  12. ^ "donkey". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  13. ^ see George 2006, p. 74.
  14. ^ 'Bootiful' dialect to be saved, BBC News, 3 July 2001
  15. ^ Classic 1980s Bernard Matthews Norfolk Turkey Bootiful (Television production). missced. 1985.
  16. ^ Wells 1982, pp. 338–9.
  17. ^ Trudgill 2003, p. 78.
  18. ^ Trudgill (2001), p. 4.
  19. ^ Trudgill (2001), pp. 4–7.
  20. ^ a b Trudgill (2001), p. 7.
  21. ^ a b Trudgill (2001), p. 8.
  22. ^ A site containing geographically located accents on an interactive map of East Anglia – the one in Thorington Street is particularly helpful in the pronunciation of "now" and similar words. Archived 2011-10-20 at the Wayback Machine
  23. ^ page 260 of On Early English Pronunciation, Part V. The existing phonology of English dialects compared with that of West Saxon speech, A.J. Ellis, Truebner & Co, London, 1889 https://archive.org/stream/onearlyenglishpr00elliuoft#page/260/mode/2up/search/whine
  24. ^ Wells 1982, p. 341.
  25. ^ Trudgill 2003, p. 82.
  26. ^ Writing in Non-Standard English, eds. Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Paivi Pahta (Philadelphia 1999) pp. 27–44
  27. ^ George 2006.

Bibliography

External links

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