Norfolk speech always strikes an outsider as very different from any other kind of accent they have come across. This is not simply a matter of superficial phonetic differences – though these are quite considerable in the case of Norfolk – but the systematic contrasts are interestingly different from those of any other British English accent. In Norfolk a number of contrasts that are assumed to have been part of all varieties of Middle English have been retained by many speakers, while a number of contrasts found in most other varieties of English have been lost. (For a treatment of Middle English phonology, see Lass, 1992.) The distinctions in question are those in (1); I have represented the ME vowels with an appropriate symbol or symbols of the International Phonetic Association alphabet, with sample words in modern English orthography.

The bracketed pairs have fallen together in Norfolk, as in other accents, that is, there is no distinction between deer and dear on the one hand and between fare and fair on the other. We shall also look at the distinction between modern English pairs such as surely and Shirley, the pronunciation of words like thirty and work, and whether room/road/put have the same vowel or not.

In the case of the pairs moan/mown and gate/gait in most other accents they have coalesced, as in RP /ƏƱ/ and /eI/, respectively, but the usual Norfolk realizations are still distinct in each pair, as in (2).

(Cf. Trudgill 1974; Trudgill and Foxcroft 1978; Lodge 1984.) In other words there is a consistent differentiation of the two lexical sets in each case, which is a continuation of the situation in ME.1 (We may note that in most cases the spelling reflects the mediaeval distinction, rather than the modern coalescence.) The gate/gait distinction is particularly interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view. Trudgill (1974: 140) points out that it is only found amongst older speakers in Norwich (note that this refers to c. 1970). By the mid-1990s it is even more difficult to find Norwich speakers who make the distinction consistently. In Norfolk, on the other hand, it is maintained even amongst some young speakers and it is used as a marker of group solidarity.