1 - Modern East Anglia as a dialect area

Summary

There is good reason to believe that the English of East Anglia has always been different, and it is clearly a distinctive variety today. Anyone speaking East Anglian English is instantly recognisable as such to those in the know. The two interesting and related questions which this paper attempts to address are: what exactly is it that we recognise? and what are the precise geographical limits of linguistic East Anglia? The answers to these two questions will necessarily involve us in determining what are the major, shared linguistic characteristics of East Anglian English. In answering these questions we will need from time to time to follow my (1990) distinction, based on Wells (1982), between Traditional and Modern Dialects (TDs and MDs).

Third-person singular zero

Probably the best-known East Anglian dialect feature, and probably also the best candidate for a shared, defining characteristic of East Anglian English, is third-person present-tense singular zero. East Anglian dialects stereotypically have zero-marking for all persons of the verb in the present tense: he go, she come, that say. Map 1 shows the extent of zero-marking on third-person present-tense verb forms, based on SED data. Of the localities investigated by the SED, it shows that this feature is found in all of Suffolk, in northeastern Essex, and in all of Norfolk except the Fens. While this map is based on TD speakers recorded in the 1950s,observations suggest that the geographical pattern demonstrated is also valid for the MDs of the 1990s. David Britain, an expert on dialects of the Fens, confirms further that the Cambridgeshire town of Wisbech and its Norfolk suburb of Emneth both have -s.

Intuitively, this map looks as if it provides us with a very good definition of linguistic East Anglia. It includes most of the uncontroversially proto-typical East Anglian counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, whose status generally as East Anglia is not at all in doubt. Note, however, that it excludes the Fens, including those parts of the Fens which are in Norfolk. It also excludes much of Essex which is,in the second half of the twentieth century, probably what we want to do.