Norfolk accent

The Norfolk dialect, also known as Broad Norfolk, is a dialect spoken by those living in the county of Norfolk in England. While less widely and purely spoken than in its heyday, the dialect and vocabulary can still be heard across the county. It employs distinctively unique pronunciations, especially of vowels; and consistent grammatical forms that differ markedly from standard English.

The Norfolk dialect is a subset of the Southern English dialect group. Geographically it covers most of the County of Norfolk apart from Gorleston and other places annexed from Suffolk.The dialect is not entirely homogenous across the county, and it merges and blends across boundaries with other East Anglian counties. From the early 1960s, the ingress of large numbers of immigrants to the county from other parts of the country, notably from the environs of London, together with the dissemination of broadcast English, and the influence of American idioms in films, television and popular music, and Anglophone speakers from other countries, has led to dilution of this distinctiveness and a dilution of the idiomatic normalcy of it within the population.

The Norfolk dialect should not be confused with Pitcairn-Norfolk, a second language of the Pitcairn Islands, or with Norfuk, the language used on Norfolk Island.

Principal Characteristics

The Norfolk accent sounds very different from that of London and the Home Counties. The main characteristics of the accent are set out below, usually with reference to the standard English accent known as Received Pronunciation or BBC Pronunciation (henceforth abbreviated as RP/BBC). Phonetic symbols (in square brackets) and phonemic symbols (in slant brackets) are used where they are needed to avoid ambiguity (brackets in IPA). Five characteristics are particularly important:

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