Norfolk dialect

The Norfolk accent sounds very different from that of London and the Home Counties.[2] The main characteristics of the accent are set out below, usually with reference to the standard English accent known as Received Pronunciation (RP). Phonetic symbols (in square brackets) and phonemic symbols (in slant brackets) are used where they are needed to avoid ambiguity (brackets in IPA). Five characteristics are particularly important:

1. The accent is generally non-rhotic, as is RP, so /r/ is only pronounced when a vowel follows it.
2. Unlike many regional accents of England, Norfolk does not usually exhibit H-dropping. The phoneme /h/ is generally pronounced in 'hat', 'ahead' by most, though not all, Norfolk speakers.
3. Norfolk speech has a distinctive rhythm due to some stressed vowels being longer than their equivalents in RP and some unstressed vowels being much shorter.
4. The distinction between /ʊ/ and /ʌ/, often known as the foot–strut split[3] is developed; the quality of /ʌ/ ('strut') is more back and close than that of contemporary RP.[4] It can be described as a centralized mid back unrounded vowel [ɤ̞̈]. A similar vowel, though somewhat lower [ʌ̈] can be heard from older RP speakers.
5. Yod-dropping is common between consonants and /uː,ʊ, u, ʊə/ resulting in pronunciations such as /muːzɪk/ for 'music' and /kuː/ for 'cue'.

• Single-syllable words with the vowel spelt 'oo' such as 'roof' and 'hoof' have the vowel [ʊ] to give [rʊf] and [hʊf] respectively.
• Single-syllable words with the vowel spelt 'oC' or 'oCe' such as 'boat' or 'home' may be pronounced with the FOOT vowel [ʊ].
• Where RP has the rounded LOT vowel /ɒ/ in words containing the spellings 'f', 'ff', 'gh' or 'th' (such as 'often', 'off', 'cough', 'trough' and 'cloth'), Norfolk may have /ɔː/ as in the vowel of THOUGHT. This is a manifestation of the lot-cloth split.
• The vowel /ɒ/ of LOT is usually realized as a long unrounded vowel [ɑː].
• The GOAT vowel /əʊ/ of RP generally has a quality that can be represented as [ʊu] in Norfolk: thus words with the spelling 'oa', 'oe' and 'oCe' such as 'boat', 'toe', 'code' sound to outsiders like 'boot', 'too', 'cood' respectively. An exception is that of words spelt with 'ou', 'ow', 'ol' such as 'soul', 'know', 'told' which have a diphthong quite similar to the RP /əʊ/. This is a preservation of the toe-tow distinction that has since been lost in most modern accents of English.
• In the speech of older Norwich residents and in rural areas, a distinction exists which is absent in RP: where the latter has the FACE vowel /eɪ/, the former accent has [æɪ] in words spelt with 'ai' or 'ay' such as 'rain' and 'day', but [ɛː] (similar to 'air') in words spelt 'aCe' such as 'take', 'late'.[5] This is a preservation of the pane-pain distinction that has since been lost in most modern accents of English.
• The distinction between the NEAR and SQUARE vowels /ɪə/ and /eə/ does not exist in Norfolk. Thus 'beer' and 'bear' sound the same, the vowel quality being [ɛː].[6] This may be considered to be a related case to that of smoothing.[7] This is a manifestation of the near-square merger.
• Where RP has a sequence of two or three vowels in succession, Norfolk smoothing results in a pronunciation with a single long vowel; for example, 'player' is [plæː] rather than /pleɪə/. Where the suffix '-ing' is preceded by a vowel or diphthong, there is a smoothing effect that results in a single vowel. Thus 'go+ing' is usually pronounced as a single syllable [ɡɔːn] rather than as a two-syllable word ending in /ən/, and 'doing' is [dɜːn] rather than /duːɪŋ/.[8]

• 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'. However, in Norfolk yod-dropping is found after non-alveolar consonants as well, and this seems to be unique. Yod-dropping therefore seems to happen 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', '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'.[9][10]
• Glottal stops [ʔ] are found widely in Norfolk speech. The consonant /t/ when following a stressed vowel is often realized as [ʔ] so that 'better' is pronounced as [beʔə]. Alternatively, /p, t, k, tʃ/ may be pronounced with the glottal closure slightly preceding the oral closure, so that 'upper' is pronounced as [ʌʔpə], 'better' is pronounced as [beʔtə], 'thicker' as [θɪʔkə] and 'butcher' as [bʊʔtʃə]. This pronunciation is also found when another consonant follows.
• In contexts where RP pronounces /l/ as "dark L" ([ɫ]), some 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 process known as L-vocalization (whereby, for example, the /l/ in 'hill', 'well', 'help' is pronounced as a back rounded vowel like /ʊ/) is not as widespread in this accent as elsewhere in Southern England.[11]
• The suffix with the spelling '-ing' found at the end of a word like 'coming', which has the pronunciation /ɪŋ/ in RP, is usually pronounced [ən]; 'coming' /kʌmɪŋ/ sounds like [kʌmən]. This is commonly known as g-dropping.
• In older Norfolk dialect the spelling 'thr' may be pronounced as /tr/ and the spelling 'shr' as /sr/; thus 'three' sounds the same as 'tree' and 'shriek' is pronounced as /sriːk/.[12]
• It used to be the case that words spelt with initial 'v' were pronounced with /w/, giving the pronunciation 'wicar' for 'vicar', 'winegar' for 'vinegar' and so on. This pronunciation is thought now to be extinct.[13]

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.[14]

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.[11][15] Claims that Norfolk speech has intonation with a distinctive "lilt" lack robust empirical evidence.

• 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".[16] 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".) It however, is used for the direct and indirect object, exactly as in Standard English, cf. "When that (subject) rain, I don't like it (object)"/"I don't like it (object), when that (subject) rain".
• Some verbs conjugate differently in Norfolk. The past tense of 'show', for example is 'shew',[17] 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'.[18] 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'.[19]
• The verb 'to be' conjugates variously in the negative. 'I'm not' can be 'I en't' or 'I in't', or often 'I aren't'. 'He/she isn't' is usually 'he en't'. 'We/you/they are not' is as elsewhere 'we/you/they aren't'. Ethel George says 'I in't going out no more'.[20] It could be that 'I in't' is the Norwich form of the Norfolk 'I en't'.
• The relative pronouns, 'who', 'which' and 'that' are mostly replaced with 'what' in Norfolk. e.g. 'That was the one what I was talking about' or 'He was shaking Pimper Wiley...what lived a few doors from us'.[21] Adjectival use of 'those' usually becomes 'them', e.g. 'I was as bad as them what done it'.[22]
• 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'.[23]

• abed (in bed)[24]
• cor blarst me ("god blast me", when expressing, shock, surprise or exasperation)[25]
• craze (nag. e.g.he kept crazing me to buy him sweets, or 'I'd craze her and craze her her'[26])
• dew yew keep a throshin (means "carry on with the threshing" on its own but also means goodbye or "take care of yourself")[25]
• dickey (donkey; however note that the word 'donkey' appears only to have been in use in English since the late 18th century.[27] 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"[28]
• dudder (shiver or tremble. It is not unique to Norfolk. Appears in the OED as 'dodder'.)[25]
• finish, at the/in the (eventually, as in "he gave it to her at the finish";[29] or "You might as well have went in the beginning, 'cause you had to go in the finish".[30])
• get on to someone (to tell someone off, as in "They all went quiet, but they never got onto father no more"[24])
• guzunder (chamber pot. Derived from "goes-under")[25]