Norfolk dialect


The Norfolk dialect, also known as Broad Norfolk, is a dialect spoken in the county of Norfolk in England. While less widely and purely spoken than in its heyday, the dialect and vocabulary can still be heard across the county, with some variations. It employs distinctively unique pronunciations, especially of vowels; and consistent grammatical forms that differ markedly from standard English.
The Norfolk dialect is very different from the dialects on the other side of the Fens, such as in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire. 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.

Distribution

The Norfolk dialect is a subset of the Southern English dialect group. Geographically it covers most of the County of Norfolk apart from Gorleston and other places annexed from Suffolk. The dialect is not entirely homogenous across the county, and it merges and blends across boundaries with other East Anglian counties. From the early 1960s, the ingress of large numbers of immigrants to the county from other parts of the country, notably from the environs of London, together with the dissemination of broadcast English, and the influence of American idioms in films, television and popular music, and Anglophone speakers from other countries, has led to dilution of this distinctiveness and a dilution of the idiomatic normality of it within the population.
The Norfolk dialect should not be confused with Pitcairn-Norfolk, a second language of the Pitcairn Islands, or with Norfuk, the language used on Norfolk Island.

Features

Accent

Principal characteristics

The Norfolk accent sounds very different from that of London and the Home Counties. The main characteristics of the accent are set out below, usually with reference to the standard English accent known as Received Pronunciation. Phonetic symbols and phonemic symbols are used where they are needed to avoid ambiguity. Five characteristics are particularly important:
  1. The accent is generally non-rhotic, as is RP, so is only pronounced when a vowel follows it.
  2. Unlike many regional accents of England, Norfolk does not usually exhibit H-dropping. The phoneme 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 and, often known as the foot–strut split is developed; the quality of is more back and close than that of contemporary RP. It can be described as a centralized mid back unrounded vowel. A similar vowel, though somewhat lower 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'.

    Vowels

The study of intonation remains undeveloped in linguistics. Writing in 1889, the phonetician Alexander John Ellis began his section on East Anglian speech with these comments:
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. Claims that Norfolk speech has intonation with a distinctive "lilt" lack robust empirical evidence.

Grammar

Some of these grammatical features are often present also in neighbouring dialects, in Suffolk, Cambridgeshire etc. Some of them are merely the retention of older speech forms, once more extensively used throughout the country. Expressions such as 'abed' meaning 'in bed', still used in Norfolk in 2009, was undoubtedly used by Shakespeare. At parting, Norfolk people often say 'fare yer well', a local version of the old English expression 'fare thee well'.

Phrases

Archaic combinations may be found, as in the double negative, "Oi hent nart gart none", i.e. "I haven't got any".
Extra words may be inserted, e.g. "Do you go hoom", meaning "Go home". Also, "Go you arn alarng tergether", meaning, "Go along with you", where tergether may be, seemingly redundant and used even in the singular case,.
The following exchange is a shibboleth for Broad Norfolk speakers.
Question : He yer fa got a dickey, bor?
Required response : Yis, an' he want a fule ter roid 'im, will yew cum?

Vocabulary

Dialect words and phrases

Portrayal of the Norfolk dialect and accent in films and TV is often regarded as poor. It is notoriously difficult for 'foreigners' to imitate, and even an actor of the distinction of Alan Bates did not adequately achieve an authentic Norfolk accent in his portrayal of the character Ted Burgess in the highly acclaimed film The Go-Between. The treatment of it in the television drama All the King's Men in 1999 in part prompted the foundation of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect, a group formed with the aim of preserving and promoting Broad Norfolk. The group campaigns for the recognition of Norfolk as a dialect, and for the teaching of "Norfolk" in schools. FOND aims to produce a digital archive of recordings of people speaking the dialect's traditional words. In July 2001 the group was awarded £4000 from the National Lottery in aid of recording equipment for this purpose.
Arnold Wesker's 1958 play Roots made good use of authentic Norfolk dialect.
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 undisputed Norfolk accent is well known from his releases of the 1960s, such as . The 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-twentieth-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; their values and enduring habits instantly familiar to Norfolk people.
Charles Dickens undoubtedly 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. 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', described in the grammar section below, is used as an example of this apparent connection.
The publication in 2006 by Ethel George 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, such that anyone familiar with the dialect can recognise an authentic Norfolk/Norwich voice speaking to them from the page.
An erudite and comprehensive study of the dialect, by Norfolk speaker and Professor of Sociolinguistics, Peter Trudgill can be found in the latter's book 'The Norfolk Dialect', published as part of the 'Norfolk Origins' series by Poppyland Publishing, Cromer.

Famous speakers