East Anglian English

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.
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.
Sub-dialects that linguist Peter Trudgill specifies include Norfolk (Broad Norfolk), Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, and various Fenland dialects.
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.
Very little is known about the Anglo-Saxon East Anglian dialect; a Suffolk charter (of Æthelflæd, before 991) is included in . 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."
Accent.
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); 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); and 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 ). However, several features also differentiate East Anglian accents.
Prosody.
In addition to the above phonological features, East Anglian English also has a distinct rhythm. This is due to the loss of unstressed syllables associated with East Anglian speakers. 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:
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.
Norwich accent.
In addition to above features, one specific accent is associated with urban Norfolk and namely its largest city, Norwich.
Portrayal.
The treatment of the Norfolk dialect in the television drama "All the King's Men" in 1999 in part prompted the foundation of the Friends of Norfolk Dialect (FOND), a group formed with the aim of preserving and promoting Broad Norfolk.
Arnold Wesker's 1958 play "Roots" used 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 Norfolk accent is well known from his releases of the 1960s, such as "Hev Yew Gotta Loight Bor?". The "Boy John Letters" 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-20th 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.
Charles Dickens 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', is used as an example of this apparent connection.
The publication in 2006 by Ethel George (with Carole and Michael Blackwell) 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.
An erudite and comprehensive study of the dialect, by Norfolk native and professor of sociolinguistics Peter Trudgill can be found in his book "The Norfolk Dialect" (2003), published as part of the 'Norfolk Origins' series by Poppyland Publishing, Cromer.