Kingdom of East Anglia - Old East Anglian Dialect

Old East Anglian Dialect

The East Angles spoke Old English. Their language is historically important, as they were among the first Germanic settlers to arrive in Britain during the fifth century: according to Kortmann and Schneider, East Anglia "can seriously claim to be the first place in the world where English was spoken".

The evidence for dialects in Old English comes from the study of texts, place-names, personal names and coins. A. H. Smith was the first to recognise the existence of a separate Old East Anglian dialect, in addition to the previously recognised dialects of Northumbrian, Mercian, Saxon and Kentish. He acknowledged that his proposal of such a dialect was tentative, acknowledging that "the linguistic boundaries of the original dialects could not have have enjoyed prolonged stability". As no East Anglian manuscripts, Old English inscriptions or literary records such as charters have survived to modern times, there is little evidence to support the existence of an Old East Anglian dialect. According to a study made by Von Feilitzen in the 1930s, the recording of many place-names in Domesday Book was "ultimately based on the evidence of local juries" and so the spoken form of Anglo-Saxon places and people was partly preserved in this way. Evidence from Domesday Book and later sources does suggest that a dialect boundary once existed, corresponding with a line that separates from their neighbours the English counties of Cambridgeshire (including the once sparsely inhabited Fens), Norfolk and Suffolk.