Suffolk Dialect - Mutations To Certain Words

Mutations To Certain Words

  • "tomorrow" becomes "'amara" (with a hard glottal stop at the beginning).
  • "I'll" becomes "oi'll" (as in "oil") e.g. "Oi'll see yer 'amara". This also happens to other words with the 'ae' sound in, such as "five", which becomes "foive".
  • "you" becomes "yer".
  • "Mother" becomes "Ma'" as with many regional accents.
  • "rope" is pronounced "roup", with an emphasis on the 'u'. Likewise, "road" also sounds like "rood" and "soap" sounds like "soup". This shows that Suffolk dialect is a context language.
  • most words ending in '-ing' become '-en', as in "Oi'm busy worken".
  • "seen" and "been" become "sin" and "bin" respectively.
  • words such as "picture" and "lecture" become "pitcher" and "letcher".
  • the perfect tense of "to show" changes from "showed" to "shew", e.g. "Oi shew er a pitcher".
  • words such as "shopping" and "office" mutate to "sharpin" and "arfice" as in "Oi'm gorn sharpin" or "Oi'm gorn down-a poost arfice".
  • "going" becomes "gorn", but unlike Norfolk, "doing" becomes "do-en".
  • "int" is used for "have not", and is similar to "ain't" in London English.
  • "ant" is used for "has not".
  • "yesterday", as well as any other words ending in '-day' becomes "-di" as in "yesterdi" and "Toosdi".
  • "it" often becomes "e'", an approximate schwa sound, somewhere between an 'e' and a 'u', like a short 'er', e.g. "Oi int gorn-a do e'".
  • "to" becomes "a", another schwa sound, after the compound future i.e. "I am going to" becomes "Oi'm gorn-a"
  • "go" and other words with an 'o' sound become 'oo', such as "Oi'm mooing the lawn".
  • words containing aʊ sounds (as in 'ouch!') become something resembling 'e-oo'. This affects words like "now" which becomes "ne-oo". This is very similar to the Welsh 'ew' sound (see the diphthongs on the bottom right) and is quite difficult to explain in writing – it should be heard to get the full gist of it. A particularly interesting website contains a dialect map, which has an example of this pronunciation.
  • pronunciation of words such as "bear" and "care" resemble New Zealand English in that they sound like "beer" and "keer".
  • "road" becomes rud laura mayes

Read more about this topic:  Suffolk Dialect

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