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
Pbeautiful in the Norfolk dialect. Two alternative spellings were discussed:
(bootiful)and (bewtiful). 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
(bewtiful)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 (dootiful)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 (bootiful).


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 (bewtiful), 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, (funeral, cure, mule) as well as few, new,
newtralise>, (new)= knew, (sewt)= suit, and (snew)= '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 (oa, oCe)and the original
diphthong by (ou, ow).) 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 (aCe)representing the original
monophthong, and (ai, ay)the diphthong. Sidney Grapes, however, employs
nonstandard orthography to indicate the preservation of the distinction, as
follows:


        aÌ      ai
        (pearper)       paper   (neybors)       neighbours
        (plearces)      places  (gays)   'pictures
        (learbor)       labour  (say)
        (pleartes)      plates  (days)
        (keark) cake    (straight)
        (fearce)        face    (lay)
                        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 (plearte)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 (r). 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
pear-air, here-hair, beer-bear are homophonous. The spelling (ear) can thus
be used to indicate a pronunciation identical to that of (air), namely
/e:/, hence (plearte) = /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 (dearze) 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:



        (trearted)      treated
        (leerned)       leaned
        (deard)         dead
        (eart)          eat
        (learve)        leave
        (plearse)       please
        (spearke)       speak
        (earse)         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 (plearse)
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
(bewtiful); and why do members of the local community object so strongly to
the spelling (bootiful)? 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 (ew) (and also (ue), 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 (wot) 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)   few
        (sewt)  suit
        (true ~ trew)   through
        (que)   queue


This enables him to represent non-dedialectalised pronunciations of words
from the boot set by using spellings such as:



        (fule)  fool
        (tew)   too
        (sune)  soon
        (muve)  move,   etc.


Of course, these spellings are possible only because of the presence of
yod-dropping in the dialect, so that (tew) 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 (fool, move).


This also explains very clearly why the non-traditional, outsiders'
spelling (bootiful) is objected to so strongly by the local community.
Native dialect-speaking insiders interpret the (oo) 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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