Vocabulary – Dialect Words and Phrases

EAST ANGLIAN ENGLISH

East Anglian English is a dialect of English spoken in East Anglia. It has a long history, just like the dialects of the Northern area. In 575 the Anglian Kingdom was founded as a result of the uniting of the North and South Folk. Besides the Angles, the Saxons lived in these surroundings too, probably since the Romans have ruled Britain. Both peoples influenced speech a lot and some words still are used in the East Anglian region, for example:

· dickey = donkey

· dodman = snail

· mawkin = scarecrow

· squit = nonsense

· mawther = a young woman – usually derogatory

· puckaterry = stress, panic

· rum = odd or unusual

· kewter = money

· lollop = progress slowly

· lug = ear

· suffun = something

However, this accent has received little attention from the media and is not easily recognized by people from other parts of the UK. East Anglian English contains:

ü Norfolk dialect (Broad Norfolk)

ü Suffolk dialect

ü Essex dialect (Confined to Northern Essex)

ü Cambridgeshire dialect and borders the East Midlands.

Norfolk dialect is considered to be the brightest in the region. The Norfolk accent sounds very different from that of London and the Home Counties. Such characteristics of the accent are particularly important:

1. The accent is generally non-rhotic, so /r/ is only pronounced when a vowel follows it.

2. The letter h is normally pronounced in Norfolk dialect, which is unusual for provincial English speech.

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. Yod-dropping is common between consonants and [u], [u:], [uə] resulting in pronunciations such as /mu:zik/ for 'music' and /ku:/ for 'cue'.

VOWELS

1. Single-syllable words with the vowel spelt 'oo' such as 'roof' and 'hoof' have the vowel [ʊ] to give [rʊf] and [hʊf] respectively.

2. Single-syllable words with the vowel spelt 'oC' or 'oCe' such as 'boat' or 'home' may be pronounced with the FOOT vowel [ʊ]. So [əu] = [u]

3. Where RP has the rounded LOT vowel /ɒ/ in words containing the spellings 'f', 'ff', 'gh' or 'th' (such as 'often', 'off', 'cough' and 'cloth'), Norfolk may have /ɔ:/ as in the vowel of THOUGHT. Ironically, much of the British media associate these pronunciations with the Queen and with old-fashioned BBC presenters.

4. The vowel /ɒ/ of LOT is usually realized as a long unrounded vowel [a:] as in many forms of American English.

5. The GOAT vowel /əʊ/ of RP generally has a quality that can be represented as [uu] in Norfolk. Thus words with the spelling 'oa', 'oe' and 'oCe' such as 'boat', 'toe', 'code' sound to outsiders like 'boot', 'too', 'cood' respectively.

6. In the speech of older Norwich residents and in rural areas a distinction exists which is absent in RP: where RP has the vowel /eɪ/ as in words 'cake', 'make', 'take', 'late' the Norfolk accent has [eə] (similar to 'air') while words spelt with 'ai', ay', ei and ey such as 'train', 'day', 'rein' and 'they' would be pronounced [æɪ] giving "traein", "daei", "raein" and "thaei".

7. The diphthong of [aɪ] in words such as right, buy, pie and sky sound more like [oi] giving "roight", "boi", "poi" and "skoi"

8. 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 [eə], cheer sounds like chair, here sounds like hair and ear sounds like air

9. 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 [plæ:] rather than /pleɪə/.

10. When the suffix '-ing' is preceded by a vowel or diphthong, that results in a single vowel. Thus 'go+ing' is usually pronounced as a single syllable [ɡɔ:n] and 'doing' is [dɜ:n] rather than /du:ɪŋ/.

11. The vowel [əu] is pronounced [a] such as the word bath in Northern and Midland accents, but with the vowel sound lengthened so church, work, heard, her and girl can be written as "chaach", "waak", "haad", "haa" and "gaal", though this pronunciation can also be written like "fust" (for first), "wust" (for worst), "bust" (for burst).

Consonants

1. 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 /tu:n/, /du:/, /su:/,/nu:/, 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, 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 it results in /з:/ so that 'cure' sounds like 'cur'.

2. 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].

3. The final [d] in a word is replaced with a [t] sound so wanted and hundred would be represented as "wantet" and "hundret".

4. The letter "Q" is pronounced "Koo". The letter combination "QMS" would be pronounced "koo-em-ess".

5. In contexts where RP pronounces /l/ as "dark L" 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'.

6. 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].

7. 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 /sri:k/.

8. Any word beginning with [v] has the first letter changed to and pronounced like a [w] so you have "wicar" instead of vicar, "winegar" instead of vinegar, "willage" instead of village and so on.

Grammar

In the third person present tense, the s at the end of verbs disappears so that 'he goes' becomes 'he go', she likes = she like; she reckons = she reckon etc. Doesn't and wasn't become don't and weren't.

Vocabulary – Dialect Words and Phrases

• ar ya reet bor? (are you all right neighbour)
• co ter heck (go to hell, an exclamation of amazement)
• come on ter rain (starts to rain, as in "if that come on ter rain we shall get wet")
• dew yar fa' ki' a dickir, bor? (Does your father keep a donkey, mate?)
• dew yew keep a troshin (means "carry on with the threshing" on its own but also means goodbye or "take care of yourself")
• fare y'well (goodbye)
• good on'yer (good for you or good of you)
• he dint ortera dun it. (he ought not to have done it).
• high learned (well-educated, clever)
• hoddy-doddy (very small)
• hold you hard ("hang on", or "wait a moment", from the practice of holding a horse's rein hard to stop it moving forward)
• ill a bed an wus up (very sick)
• lend us a lug (when asking someone else to listen in to a conversation for you)
• lolloping along (strolling along)
• mind how you go (good-bye)
• my heart alive! (expression of surprise, similar to "good gracious me!")
• my man, my woman (used when addressing children, especially when telling off)
• slummocking great mawther (fat girl)
• suffun savidge ("something savage" - very angry)
• thas a rummun (it's very strange)
• that crazes me! (that really annoys me)
• titty-totty (very small)
• "yesterdi", "Toosdi" (yesterday and Tuesday)
• shink (I should think so)

· a'smornun (this morning)

· bor (pronounced 'buh' in West Norfolk) (a term of address, boy or neighbor

• dussent (dare not, as in 'he dussent do it')
• gawp (look or stare (what you gawpin at?)
• hant, hent, hint (have not)
• jip (feeling, sense of pain, as in 'that give me jip')
• larn (to learn, used in place of to teach: "he larned me how to ride a hoss")

Date: 2016-04-22; view: 1793