NORFOLK DIALECT

THE FALGATE INN, POTTER HEIGHAM

THE PUB SIGN IN 1970

THE NORFOLK DIALECT is almost entirely a spoken form of language. The Boy John Letters by Sidney Grapes, that enlivened the pages of the Eastern Daily Press when I was a boy, made a valiant attempt to present the accent in print, but this is a very hard thing to do.  The understated humour of Norfolk speech comes through, but the particular nuances of Broad Norfolk do not translate well to the written page. There is for example no way to present the rise and fall of the voice, and that is a crucial part of the Norfolk dialect.

Where the Norfolk dialect may be authentically presented in written form it is in the grammar. This photograph of the Falgate Inn at Potter Heigham is an example of this. The rhyme on the pub sign occurs on at least two other pubs in England, but in these cases the grammar is standard English; “This gate hangs high and hinders none...”Only at Potter Heigham does the verse appear without the ‘s’ in the third person singular. This is genuine Broad Norfolk.

The local dialect is a mixture of distinct words, the Norfolk pronunciation and local grammar. I cannot give you a better example of the grammatical peculiarity of Broad Norfolk than this pub sign. There are in existence letters written by the Norfolk-born Lord Nelson where he uses this same form of the third person singular verb; “Captain Lambert have been very fortunate” –  not has been very fortunate. We should be cautious before attributing Norfolk grammar to Nelson however. It might have been his Norfolk birth coming through but, as my sister points out, it was common in the early 19th century to use similar verb endings that would now be considered irregular. This occurs not only in the third person but in the second person too; ‘you was’ instead of ‘you were’  was also a common usage.

As an example of  words that only occur in the Norfolk dialect I  give you ‘bor‘. Some commentators have the opinion that this is an abbreviation of the word neighbour, while others suggest it means boy. While I prefer the second version, neither of these quite represent the way in which the word is used. In my humble opinion it is a word in its own right. Another common word is do, which is used in the sense of or else;  “Shut the door, do that’ll be wholly cold.”  The word wholly (it must be pronounced hully with a short vowel) means very and is typical of the Norfolk dialect. The  use of the word that rather than it as in the sentence quoted above is also part of the dialect.

I would like to record spink (the Norfolk word for finch) as unique to our dialect, but in fact the word occurs in other dialects, as far north as Scotland. Fred Barnes (a good old Norfolk boy) assured me that it was part of Norfolk dialect, but in fact it is an Anglo-Saxon word. I dare say that it has survived in the Norfolk speech far longer than elsewhere, but that does mean it originated here. In fact many of the words we regard as part of Norfolk’s own dialect are in fact survivals from Anglo-Saxon; many others, like staithe (a landing-place), flag (yellow iris) and grup (a shallow trench) are all Danish in origin, reflecting the 9th century occupation of East Anglia by the Vikings. Still others have entered the dialect from the continent, brought in by the 17th century influx of Protestant refugees from Flanders and France.  A good example of this type of word is plain, which in Norfolk is used to signify a town or village square. The same word (although spelt slightly differently) is found in exactly the same context in the Netherlands (for example in Eindhoven) and as far south as Beziers in Southern France.

The Vocabulary of the East Anglian Tongue (which has a much longer title that I will not include here) was written by the Rev Robert Forby, and posthumously published in two volumes in 1830.  Although written 200 years ago, and perhaps in need of revision (at least as far as some of its philological/linguistic assumptions are concerned) it is the bedrock for anyone who wishes to study the Norfolk and Suffolk dialects. Is there is any difference between Norfolk and Suffolk speech? In the grammar and words there is no difference discernible to me, but there are certainly subtle variations in pronunciation. The word note for instance would be said nut (with a short vowel) in some parts of East Anglia, and noot (with a long vowel) in others, but don’t ask me where!

I will mention the word dog, which is always pronounced dawg in East Anglia. In this way Norfolk speech corresponds to the high-class drawl, which is another departure from standard English. As the distinguished upper class man said to my grandfather in Cawston Post Office: “I say my man, does this little shop sell dorg biscuits?” (My ancestor’s reply was: “Yes Sir. Shall I wrap them for you, or will you be eating them now?”)

When I was ten I had begun to pick up some Suffolk dipthongs from my country schoolmates at Bungay. I happened to remark on a roadway with restricted access that we passed while out in the car. I called it a “proivate droive”. My Norwich High School educated sisters burst out in hoots of derision; proivate droive, proivate droive, they kept saying. I soon learnt that received pronunciation (private drive) was the way to speak, if I wanted to get on in the world. This isn’t entirely true; I had a friend at Oxford who spoke with a marked Lancastrian accent, and that was accepted without demur by me and my colleagues; the Northern accent is regarded as quite normal and acceptable, while rural Norfolk dialect is seen (for some reason) as primitive and backward. Of course, when my friend wrote it was in standard English, and you could not tell where he was born. If I had used my Norfolk dialect in my writing I would have used strange words, and non-standard grammar, I would have been rejected as uncouth.

Accent is one thing but dialect, with its own grammar and vocabulary, is quite another. Whatever your views on the moral equivalence of dialect and ‘good’ English, standard English is required if you wish to write for national publications. This is an undeniable fact. The only acceptable use of written dialect is in humour, whether it is the newspaper columns of Keith Skipper or the Scottish of Neil Munro. (He was the author of Para Handy). Even then. the  local dialect is obscure to those who are not familiar with the original. The Scots dialect is fine on television, when you can hear it; it may be understood then, but try reading Neil Munro if you an Englishman! Especially as it the dialect includes words in Gaelic. (It is worth the effort though, as it is extremely funny when read aloud from the book, as my father was able t do.)

I would like to mention my father, who normally spoke in perfect received English, but who could, when the occasion was right, break into the broadest of Norfolk. This he he must have picked up as a child, during the First World War. In this respect he mirrored my schoolteacher Dick Bagnall- Oakeley, who picked up his dialect at Hemsby Council School at about the same time. They both spoke it like natives, which they were. However my father was also an expert in Neil Munro’s Scots dialect, and he never went nearer to Scotland than Derbyshire.

I should thank my correspondent Les Lawrence for suggesting that I turn my attention to the Norfolk dialect. This article has been the result.

JOSEPH MASON

joemasonspage@gmail.com

FOR THOUGHTS ON EAST ANGLIAN LIFE