During the summer of 1996, a fierce controversy developed in the pages of

the Eastern Daily Press, the morning newspaper published in Norwich with a

circulation area covering the county of Norfolk and some neighbouring

districts. The controversy concerned the correct spelling of the word

beautiful in the Norfolk dialect. Two alternative spellings were discussed:

and . The discussion made it very clear that neither

side had any understanding at all of the point the other side was making,

although it was apparent that in some sense the supporters of

were the traditionalists.

A knowledge of the phonology of Norfolk dialect permits us to

explain what was happening in this discussion. Like the accents of

neighbouring areas of East Anglia and the East Midlands, Norfolk English is

characterised by 'yod-dropping' (Wells 1982). That is, items such as pew,

beauty, music, tune, duke, new, queue, few, view, huge have no /j/ between

the initial consonant and the following vowel so that, for example, who and

Hugh are homophones (see Trudgill 1974, Hughes & Trudgill 1996).

This is a very salient feature of the Norfolk dialect for speakers

of other forms of English, and, not surprisingly, outsiders trying to

represent the local dialect in writing make attempts to indicate this

pronunciation. Dickens, for example, writes dutiful as when

attempting to portray East Anglian dialect in his novel David Copperfield.

And a particular and widely-sold brand of Norfolk turkeys is advertised to

the British population as a whole as being .

For insiders, however, yod-dropping is not a salient feature at

all, and no attempt is made to reprasent this feature in dialect writing by

native speakers of the dialect. The traditional dialect spelling of

beautiful is indeed , which is quite acceptable to insiders, but

which wrongly suggests the pronunciation /bju:-/ to outsiders.

One interesting question arises from this observation: why are some

features of the local dialect salient for native-speaker dialect writers,

and others not? In this short paper, I attempt to answer this question with

reference to literature written in the Norfolk dialect, and with particular

reference to the "Boy John letters" of Sidney Grapes (1958).

The Boy John letters represent a body of Norfolk dialect work of

not a little genius. The letters were written to and published in the

Eastern Daily Press between 1946 and 1958, and a selection was later

published in a booklet entitled The Boy John. Sidney Grapes was the

proprietor of a bicycle shop, later a garage and motor business, in Potter

Heigham, a village in the northeast Norfolk Broadland district. In the

years before the Second World War, he acquired a reputation as an amateur

Norfolk dialect comedian, performing at social functions in many parts of

the county and on the radio. The letters appeared in the newspaper at

irregular intervals - Grapes would simply write them when he felt like it -

and were always signed "The Boy John". They purported to be reports of

events in the Boy John's village, and, in addition to the Boy John - a farm

worker himself - they featured as their main characters his Aunt Agatha,

Granfar, and old Mrs. W their neighbour. Most of the letters ended

with a PS containing one of Aunt Agatha's aphorisms, which became famous

throughout the county, such as "Aunt Agatha she say: all husbands are

alike, only they have different faces so you can tell 'em apart".

Not only were the characterisations and vignettes of village life

brilliant - and therefore enormously popular - but Sidney Grapes was also ,

by common consent, a superb writer of the local dialect, right down to

subtleties such as Granfar speaking in a more conservative, traditional way

than the other characters. His orthography was somewhat variable, even to

the extent of spelling the same word in two different ways in the same

letter, but it was always accurate within the framework of the conventions

he was working with.

In an attempt to explain the differential salience of Norfolk

dialect features for Norfolk dialect writers, a number of vowels can be

discussed. We have already noted that traditional Norfolk dialect writers

do not indicate yod-dropping, and Sidney Grapes was no exception. He

writes, for example, as well as

newtralise>, = knew, = suit, and = 'snowed'.

Of particular interest amongst the other features which he does not

indicate is the following. Traditional dialects of East Anglian English,

unlike most other accents of the language, preserved the Middle English

distinction between monophthongal a´ and oÉ´, on the one hand, and

diphthongal ai and ou, on the other (see Trudgill 1974):

daze /de:z/ nose /nu:z/

days /dæiz/ knows /näuz/.

There is no special attempt in the Boy John letters to indicate the

presentation of the nose-knows distinction in the dialect. (Of course,

standard orthography does this for the most part in any case, with the

original monophthong being represented by and the original

diphthong by .) Neither is there any attempt to indicate the

distinctive quality of the nose vowel in the dialect: /u:/ = [úu].

The daze-days distinction, however, is treated very differently. In

this case, too, the standard orthography for the most part reflects the

original Middle English distinction, with representing the original

monophthong, and the diphthong. Sidney Grapes, however, employs

nonstandard orthography to indicate the preservation of the distinction, as

follows:

aÌ ai

paper neighbours

places 'pictures'

labour

plates

cake

face

etc.

The explanation for the differential treatment of the two sets of

oppositions would appear to be as follows. The fact is that, at the time of

the composition of the Boy John letters and until very recently, all

Norfolk English speakers consistently and automatically maintained the

nose-knows distinction (see Trudgill, forthcoming). In the 1940s and 1950s,

it was therefore a totally unremarkable feature of Norfolk English shared

by all speakers, and therefore of no salience whatsoever. Indeed, as I can

testify from my own personal experience, there was no awareness at all that

speakers of other varieties of English did not preserve the distinction.

The daze-days distinction, on the other hand, was beginning to

disappear already in the 1940s. This disappearance was being effected (see

Trudgill & Foxcroft 1978) by the gradual and variable transfer of lexical

items from the set of /e:/ to the set of /æi/ as part of a

dedialectalisation process, the end-point of which will soon be (a few

speakers even today maintain a vestigial and variable distinction) the

complete merger of the two lexical sets under /æi/ - the completion of a

slow process of lexical diffusion.

It is, then, precisely the fact of dedialectalisation of this

particular feature which leads to its salience for local, as opposed to

non-local, dialect writers. Some local speakers have maintained the

distinction, others have lost it, and others are in the process of losing

it. Words such as paper can be pronounced both /pe:pë/ and /pæipë/ - and

very often by the same speaker. It is this variability within the speech

community which leads to its salience, and hence its depiction in the

dialect literature.

We can thus establish a principle of dialect orthography which is

observed in the Boy John letters and doubtless in other dialect writing

also: only phonological features which are currently undergoing

dedialectalisation are systematically represented by nonstandard dialect

orthography as written by native speakers. The daze-days distinction is

indicated in the Boy John letters because it is dying out, while the

nose-knows distinction, which is (or was at the time of writing) alive and

well, is not.

The spelling which Sidney Grapes employs to indicate the

disappearing, older Traditional Dialect pronunciation which descended from

Middle English aÌ requires some explanation. In order to appreciate and

understand the spelling for plate, it is necessary to know, first,

that the Norfolk dialect is non-rhotic: no /r/ is to be inferred from the

use of . Secondly, it is necessary to know that in the modern Norfolk

dialect, the vowels /íë/ and /èë/ have merged as /e:/: the lexical sets of

near and square both have /e:/, with the consequence that pairs such as

ear-air, here-hair, beer-bear are homophonous. The spelling can thus

be used to indicate a pronunciation identical to that of , namely

/e:/, hence = /ple:t/ rather than /plæit/.

At this point, comparison with modern (1990s) dialect writing is

instructive. The current regular dialect writing of a popular local author

in the Eastern Daily Press demonstrates two major differences from the work

of Sidney Grapes as far as the vowel /e:/ is concerned. Firstly, the modern

author spells items such as days as or something similar. This is

clearly in some sense "wrong". Either he is representing an existing and

recent hyperdialectism as employed by Norfolk dialect speakers, or he is

using a non-existent hyperdialectism. In any case, dedialectalisation has

clearly proceeded to such an extent that while the older Traditional

Dialect /e:/ pronunciation is remembered as a dialectal stereotype, its

correct, historical distribution over lexical items is not, with these

hyperdialectal consequences (see Trudgill 1986).

Secondly, in addition to the spellings we have noted, the Boy John

letters also contain spellings such as the following:

treated

leaned

dead

eat

leave

please

speak

ease

The newer Eastern Daily Press dialect writing contains no such

spellings. The reason for this is also clear. The point made above about

current dedialectalisation is the relevant one. It is rather obvious that

features which have undergone total dedialectalisation, and have thus

disappeared from the common memory as well as from common speech, are

unlikely to make an appearance in dialect writing. Either dialect writers

are no longer familiar with them, or they are aware that their readers will

not be able to understand what is being indicated. The point is that

realisations of Middle English as e´É as /e:/ were once very common in the

Norfolk dialect. The records made by the American dialectologist Guy Lowman

in the 1930s, for example, give pronunciations such as beans [be_:nz]; and

in my own family, there are recollections of an elderly neighbour who, in

the 1920s, referred to herself as "a poor old /kre:të/" = 'creature'.

Clearly, however, even seventy years ago such pronunciations were in the

process of disappearing as a result of dedialectalisation, and were being

replaced by General English /i:/. At the time when Sidney Grapes was

writing, they were still present in the speech of older dialect speakers -

or at least in the collective memory. The Boy John could write

confident that this rendering would be meaningful to his readers. Fifty

years later, this is no longer possible, for such pronunciations have now

been totally dedialectalised and forgotten.

We can now return to our initial discussion of beautiful. Why is it

that there is a tradition in Norfolk dialect writing of using the spelling

; and why do members of the local community object so strongly to

the spelling ? We have already seen that Norfolk dialect writers

make no attempt to portray yod-dropping as a local dialect feature. We now

understand why this is: yod-dropping is not undergoing dedialectalisation.

It is a normal feature of the speech of everybody in Norfolk with a local

accent and has thus not achieved any degree of salience in the local

community.

Rather, the function of the spelling (and also , as we

shall see) appears to be two-fold. First, it is an eye-dialect device

designed to indicate or at least hint at nonstandard phonetic features such

as a diphthongal realisation of the vowel [ëù] and, in the case of

beautiful, glottaling or glottalisation (see Wells 1982) of intervocalic

/t/, just as the spelling for what, which is meaningless as far as

the vowel in concerned, is used in much English dialect writing to indicate

[wâ÷] rather than [wât].

Secondly and more importantly, it is also employed to indicate

vowel selection in a particular lexical set which is undergoing

dedialectalisation. The English of the county of Norfolk has two close

rounded vowels, as opposed to the one of most English accents. The central

vowel /ù:/ occurs in items such as beautiful and rude, while the back vowel

/u:/ occurs in items such as nose, road (but not, as we have already seen,

in know, rowed, which have /äu/). Items such as boot, rood, fool, however

can have either the more dialectal /ù:/ or the less dialectal /u:/. As we

have seen, Sidney Grapes uses spellings for the beautiful set such as:

few

suit

through

queue

This enables him to represent non-dedialectalised pronunciations of words

from the boot set by using spellings such as:

fool

too

soon

move, etc.

Of course, these spellings are possible only because of the presence of

yod-dropping in the dialect, so that is understood to begin with /t-/

and not /tj-/. But they convey totally unambiguously to the local audience

that the pronunciation being indicated is dialectal /fù:l, mù:v/ rather

than dedialectalised /fu:l, mu:v/, which is what would be understood from

the standard spellings .

This also explains very clearly why the non-traditional, outsiders'

spelling is objected to so strongly by the local community.

Native dialect-speaking insiders interpret the spelling as indicating

the utterly nonexistent pronunciation */bu:tëfël/ rather than the correct

/bù:tëfël/. As usual, Norfolk people know best.

References

Grapes, S. (1958) The Boy John. Norwich: Norfolk News Company. Reissued

1974, Norwich: Wensum Books.

Hughes, A. & P. Trudgill (1966) English accents and dialects: an

inytroduction of varieties of English in the British Isles. 3rd edition.

London: Edward Arnold.

Trudgill, P. (1974) The social differentiation of English in Norwich.

Cambridge: CUP.

- (1986) Dialects in contact. Oxford: Blackwell.

- (forthcoming) "The great East Anglia merger mystery." Paper

presented at the Historical Phonology Conference, Slesin, Poland, May 1996.

- & T. Foxcroft (1978) "On the sociolinguistics of vocalic mergers:

transfer and approximation in East Anglia." In P. Trudgill (ed.)

Sociolinguistic patterns in British English. London: Edward Arnold, pp.

69-79.

Wells, J

Peter Trudgill FBA

Professor of English Language and Linguistics

Section d'anglais

University of Lausanne

Switzerland

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