Dialect Maintenance in East Anglia

Abstract

The area of East Anglia in which its traditional dialects are spoken has shrunk significantly over the past few decades and seen a marked decline in the use of traditional features. These include lack of -s marking on third-person singular forms (Kingston, 2000; Potter, 2018), as well as the long-standing distinction between those words descended from Middle English /ɔ:/ and /ɔu/, as in ‘moan’ vs ‘mown’, which failed to become homophonous as part of the Long Mid Mergers (Wells, 1982a). Like other relics, this distinction now only remains in East Anglia's more northern locales (Trudgill & Foxcroft, 1978; Trudgill, 2004; Butcher, 2019). This apparent ‘dialect death’ situation (Trudgill, 1986: 68) is the outcome of continued supralocalisation, a situation in which locally specific linguistic forms lose out to linguistic variants with greater socio-spatial currency, usually as a result of mobility and dialect contact (Britain, 2010). In East Anglia's case, Trudgill (2001) argues that dialect levelling has largely been driven by the impact of London and Home Counties varieties of English. This process is predicted to continue (Trudgill, 1986; Kingston, 2000), though is unlikely to be straightforward. Britain (2011) reports that substantial intra-regional differences are found in relation to route and rate of sound change in East Anglia. This calls for more comprehensive analyses of East Anglian English to better understand the workings of this ‘heterogenous homogenisation’ (Britain, 2011: 57), and how individual case studies relate to the overall shrinkage of the area in which traditional East Anglian dialects are spoken. This paper presents data in this vein from two studies undertaken in Suffolk, southern East Anglia. The first presents data on unstressed vowel tensing, which refers to the alternation between [ə] and [ɪ] in those unstressed syllables where /ɪ/ occurs in other varieties of Southern British English (SBE) e.g. ‘carpet’ [kɑ:pɪt] / [ka:pəʔ]. The second reports data on yod dropping, i.e. the absence of /j/ from sequences of C+/ju/ e.g. ‘huge’ [hju:dʒ] / [hu:dʒ]. Both variables are well known from descriptions of East Anglian dialects but, as we will see later, they appear to behave differently in this study of contemporary East Anglian English.