East Anglian English
East Anglian
RegionEast Anglia and Essex
EthnicityEast Anglians
Early form
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. 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, such as in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire, so there was little dialect contact between the two sides of the Fens.[2]

Linguist Peter Trudgill has identified several sub-dialects, including Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, and various Fenland dialects.[1]

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]
  • 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]

Vocabulary

  • bishybarnybee – a ladybird[3]
  • dag – dew[3]
  • dene – the sandy area by the coast[3]
  • dickey – donkey; however note that the word 'donkey' appears only to have been in use in English since the late 18th century.[7] The Oxford English Dictionary quotes 'dicky' as one of the alternative slang terms for an ass.)
  • dodman – a term used to refer to a snail[3]
  • dow – a pigeon[3]
  • dwile – floorcloth[3]
  • dudder – shiver or tremble (not necessarily unique to Norfolk, it appears in the OED as dodder)[8]
  • gays – the pictures printed on a book or a newspaper[3]
  • grup – refers to a small trench[3]
  • guzunder – chamber pot (derived from "goes-under")[8]
  • hutkin – used for a finger protecter[3]
  • mawkin – a scarecrow[3]
  • mawther – local word referring to a girl or young woman[3]
  • on the huh, on the moo - askew
  • 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]

Accent

On the one hand, East Anglian English shows some of the general accent features of South East England, including non-rhoticity (in fact, one of the first English-speaking regions to lose rhoticity);[9] g-dropping; the trap–bath split (though the quality of BATH may be fronter than RP); the foot–strut split[10] (though the quality of STRUT, /ʌ/, may be more back and close than that of RP);[11] and widespread glottal reinforcement of stop consonants (so that /p, t, k/ are pronounced with the glottal closure slightly following the oral closure, so that 'upper' is pronounced as [ʌpʔə], 'better' as [betʔə] or now commonly [beʔə], and 'thicker' as [θɪkʔə]).

On the other hand, certain features associated with London, like H-dropping and L-vocalisation, are rarer in East Anglia.[12][13] However, H-dropping is indeed typical in urban Norwich,[14] and L-vocalisation increasingly prevalent in Suffolk.[13] Several features below also differentiate East Anglian accents.

Vowels

  • BATH/PALM/START is a very front vowel [aː], unlike RP or London English where it is a back vowel.[15]
  • /ʊ/ was once used in a particular subset of words (certain closed- and single-syllable words) within the GOAT set, such as coat, don't, home, stone, and whole (the final item a homophone with hull: [hʊl]).[15] This was extremely old-fashioned even by the late 20th century.[16]
  • Single-syllable words with the vowel spelt 'oo' such as 'roof' and 'hoof' have the vowel [ʊ] to give [rʊf] and [hʊf] respectively.
  • The toe–tow merger typical of most Modern English dialects may continue to be resisted. Thus, there may be two realisations of the GOAT vowel: with words like toe pronounced with [ʊu~uː] versus words with a spelling "ou" or "ow" like tow, pronounced with a wide diphthong like [ʌu].[17] However, the toe-tow merger is on the rise even in East Anglia and is already well-established in Ipswich (Suffolk) and Colchester (Essex).[18][19]
  • The pane–pain merger typical of most Modern English dialects may continue to be resisted. In the speech of older Norwich residents and in rural East Anglia, the FACE vowel, /eɪ/, is [æɪ] in words spelt with 'ai' or 'ay' such as 'rain' and 'day', but [eː] or [ɛː] (similar to 'air') in words spelt 'aCe' such as 'take', 'late'.[20] This has largely given way throughout most of East Anglia to a merger towards [æɪ].[21]
  • /ɜːr/ as in first is pronounced [a] or [ɐ]: [fɐst].[22] Since the mid-20th century, this very open realisation has largely disappeared, at least in urban East Anglia.[23]
  • /aɪ/ is traditionally [ɐi], a narrower glide than RP, but since the second half of the 20th century, a backer realisation is favoured, [ɑi].[24]

Consonants

  • Yod-dropping occurs after all consonants. 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 after any consonant, and this seems to be a unique regionalism. Therefore, 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",[8] "foo", "hooge", "akooz".
  • "Clear L" is possible in all contexts in speakers born before 1920.[25] In contexts where RP pronounces /l/ as "dark L" ([ɫ]), these older Norfolk speakers have "clear L" so that the sound in 'hill' and 'milk' sounds similar to the clear L heard at the beginning of words such as 'lip'. The London-like process known as L-vocalization is not traditional in Norfolk.[13]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Trudgill (2001).
  2. ↑ Trudgill, Peter; Fisiak, Jacek (2001). East Anglian English. Boydell & Brewer. p. 220. ISBN 9780859915717.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Trudgill, Peter (17 August 2012). "East Anglian English". Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 10 March 2018. Retrieved 18 March 2018.
  4. ↑ Bensusan (1949).
  5. ↑ Trudgill (2001), p. 1.
  6. 1 2 Trudgill (2001), p. 2.
  7. ↑ "donkey". Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. (Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
  8. 1 2 3 'Bootiful' dialect to be saved, BBC News, 3 July 2001
  9. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 87.
  10. ↑ Wells 1982, pp. 335–6.
  11. ↑ Lodge 2009, p. 168.
  12. ↑ Trudgill (2001), p. 4.
  13. 1 2 3 Trudgill (2021), p. 86.
  14. ↑ Wells 1982, p. 341.
  15. 1 2 Trudgill (2001), p. 7.
  16. ↑ Wells 1982, p. 338.
  17. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 76.
  18. ↑ Wells 1982, p. 337.
  19. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 77.
  20. ↑ Lodge 2009, pp. 167–8.
  21. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 70-71.
  22. ↑ Trudgill (2001), pp. 4–7.
  23. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 69.
  24. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 71-72.
  25. ↑ Trudgill (2021), p. 84.

Bibliography

  • Bensusan, Samuel Levy (1949), Right Forward Folk, Routledge & Kegan Paul
  • Lodge, Ken (2009), A Critical Introduction to Phonetics, Continuum International Publishing Group, ISBN 978-0-8264-8873-2
  • Trudgill, Peter (2001), "Modern East Anglia as a dialect area", in Fisiak, Jacek; Trudgill, Peter (eds.), East Anglian English, Boydell & Brewer, pp. 1–12, ISBN 978-0-85991-571-7
  • Trudgill, Peter (2003), The Norfolk Dialect, Poppyland
  • Trudgill, Peter (2021), East Anglian English, De Gruyter Mouton
  • Sweet, Henry (1946), Onions, Charles Talbut (ed.), Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader (10th ed.), Oxford: Clarendon Press
  • Wells, John C. (1982), Accents of English, Vol. 1: An Introduction (pp. i–xx, 1–278), Vol. 2: The British Isles (pp. i–xx, 279–466), Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-52129719-2 , 0-52128540-2 
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