East Anglia
Features which can be found in East Anglian English (especially in Norfolk) include:
- Yod-dropping after all consonants: beautiful may be pronounced, often represented as "bootiful" or "bewtiful", huge as, and so on.
- Absence of the long mid merger between Early Modern English /oː/ (as in toe, moan, road, boat) and /ɔʊ/ (as in tow, mown, rowed). The vowel of toe, moan, road, boat may be realised as, so that boat may sound to outsiders like boot.
- Glottal stop frequent for /t/.
- The diphthong /aɪ/ (as in price) realised as, sounding very much like the diphthong in Received Pronunciation choice.
- The vowel /ɒ/ (as in lot) realised as an unrounded vowel, as in many forms of American English.
- Merger of the vowels of near and square (RP /ɪə/ and /ɛə/), making chair and cheer homophones.
- East Anglian accents are generally non-rhotic.
There are differences between areas within East Anglia, and even within areas: the Norwich accent has distinguishing aspects from the Norfolk dialect that surrounds it – chiefly in the vowel sounds. The accents of Suffolk and Cambridgeshire are different from the Norfolk accent.
Read more about this topic: English In Southern England
Famous quotes containing the word east:
“At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)