East Anglian English

History

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".
• Use of the word do with the meaning of or, or else ''otherwise, for example "You better go to bed now, do you’ll be tired in the morning" And do idiomatically used as "now you must"
• 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". The final example still uses it, but only when it is the object of a verb. 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". 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.
• Time is used to mean while, for example, "You sit down, time I get dinner ready."
• Now can also mean just, i.e. "I am now leaving" also means "I am just leaving".
• Some verbs conjugate differently in Norfolk or Suffolk. The past tense of 'show', for example is 'shew', 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', and 'stank' is always '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 get the needle out, it moved'. 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'.
• The present participle, or...ing, form of the verb, such as running, writing etc. is mostly rendered in the Middle English form of 'a-runnin, 'a-jumpin'' etc. 'She's a-robbin' me'.

  Vocabulary

• abed – in bed
• bishybarnybee – a ladybird
• bor – neighbour in Norfolk
• cor blarst me – "god blast me", when expressing, shock, surprise or exasperation
• craze – nag. e.g. he kept crazing me to buy him sweets, or I'd craze her and craze her)
• dag – dew
• dene – the sandy area by the coast
• dew yew keep a throshin – means "carry on with the threshing" on its own in Norfolk but also means goodbye or "take care of yourself"
• dickey – donkey; however note that the word 'donkey' appears only to have been in use in English since the late 18th century "apparently of dialect or slang origin" and attributed to Suffolk and Essex. 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"
• dodman – a term used to refer to a snail
• dow – a pigeon
• dwile – floorcloth
• dudder – shiver or tremble
• finish, at the/in the – eventually, as in "he gave it to her at the finish"; or "You might as well have went in the beginning, 'cause you had to go in the finish".)
• get on to someone – to tell someone off, as in "They all went quiet, but they never got onto father no more")
• gays – the pictures printed on a book or a newspaper
• grup – refers to a small trench
• guzunder – chamber pot
• hutkin – used for a finger protector
• mawkin – a scarecrow
• mawther – local word referring to a girl or young woman
• on the huh, on the moo - askew
• pit – a pond
• push – a boil or pimple
• quant – punt pole
• ranny – term meaning 'shrew'
• sowpig – a woodlouse
• staithe – an archaic term still used to reference any landing stage
• stroop – the throat

  Accent

• Non-rhoticity; in fact, one of the first English-speaking regions to lose rhoticity;
• G-dropping;
• The trap–bath split, though the quality of may be fronter than RP;
• The foot–strut split, though the quality of,, may be more back and close than that of RP;
• Widespread glottal reinforcement of stop consonants, so that are pronounced with the glottal closure slightly following the oral closure, so that upper is pronounced as, better as or now commonly, and thicker as.

Vowels

• Norfolk smoothing results in a pronunciation of two or three vowel syllables with a single long vowel; for example, player is rather than. 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 rather than as a two-syllable word ending in, and doing is rather than. This phenomenon is the only one in East Anglia that is spreading, in the 21st century, from north to south.
• The vowel found in // is a very front vowel, unlike RP or London English where it is a back vowel.
• Words containing sounds can be more fronted or raised compared against most other English dialects: often, or.
• Single-syllable words with the vowel spelt such as roof and hoof have the vowel to give and respectively.
• The toe–tow merger typical of most Modern English dialects may continue to be resisted. The vowel generally has a quality that can be represented with a narrow glide like in Norfolk: thus words with the spelling, and such as boat, toe, code sound to outsiders like boot, too, cood respectively. An exception is that of words spelt with,, such as soul, know, told which have a wider glide quite similar to the RP, or even wider. However, the toe-tow merger is indeed well-established in Ipswich and Colchester, in the 21st century expanding gradually into Norfolk.
• * A third phonetic distinction once existed within the set, causing a subset of these words, such as coat, don't, home, stone, and whole to be pronounced with. Thus, whole was a homophone with hull:. This was extremely old-fashioned even by the late 20th century.
• 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 vowel,, is in words spelt with or such as rain and day, but or in words spelt such as take, late. This has largely given way throughout most of East Anglia to a merger towards.
• The near-square merger variably occurs, particularly among the working class, so that the and vowels and sound the same in Norwich. Thus beer and bear sound the same, the vowel quality being. This may be considered to be a related case to that of smoothing.
• as in is pronounced or :. Since the mid-20th century, this very open realisation has largely disappeared, at least in urban East Anglia.
• is traditionally, a narrower glide than RP, but since the second half of the 20th century, a backer realisation is favoured,.

  Consonants

• Yod-dropping occurs after all consonants. Yod-dropping after alveolar consonants is found in many English accents, and widely in American pronunciation, so that words like tune, due, sue, new are pronounced,,,, 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 is pronounced as Norfolk . For example, beautiful, few, huge, accuse have pronunciations that sound like bootiful, foo, hooge, akooz. A parallel case involves the vowel of : in RP the word is pronounced with initial, but Norfolk speakers omit the and smoothing results in so that cure sounds like cur.
• H-dropping is rarer than in most other parts of England.
• Clear L is possible in all contexts in speakers born before 1920. In contexts where RP pronounces as "dark L", 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 process known as L-vocalization is not as widespread in this accent as elsewhere in Southern England, though it is increasingly prevalent in Suffolk.