Vowels NURSE

Older forms of the dialect have an additional vowel in this sub-system. If we examine representations of words from the NURSE set in twentieth-century dialect literature, we find the following:

Item                     Dialect Spelling

her                        har

heard                   hard

nerves                  narves

herself                 harself

service                 sarvice

earn                     arn

early                    arly

concern               consarn

sir                         sar

fur                        far

daren’t                dussent

first                      fust, fasst

worse                  wuss

church                 chuch, chatch

purpose               pappus

turnip                   tannip

further                  futher

hurl                       hull

turkey                  takkey

turn                      tann

hurting                 hatten

nightshirt             niteshat

shirts                     shats

girl                         gal                

On the subject of words such as these in East Anglian dialects, Forby (1830: 92) wrote:

To the syllable ur (and consequently to ir and or, which have often the same sound) we give a pronunciation certainly our own.

Ex.   Third word burn curse

         Bird curd dirt worse

It is one which can be neither intelligibly described, nor represented by other letters. It must be heard. Of all legitimate English sounds, it seems to come nearest to open a [the vowel of balm], or rather to the rapid utterance of the a in the word arrow, supposing it to be caught before it light on the r... Bahd has been used to convey our sound of bird. Certainly this gets rid of the danger of r; but the h must as certainly be understood to lengthen the sound of a; which is quite inconsistent with our snap-short utterance of the syllable. In short it must be heard.

My own observations of speakers this century suggest that earlier forms of East Anglian English had a checked vowel system consisting of seven vowels. The additional vocalic item, which I represent as , was a vowel somewhat more open than half-open, and slightly front of central, which occurred in the lexical set of church, first. Dialect literature, as we have seen, generally spells words from the lexical set of first, church as either as <fust> or <chatch> . The reason for this vacillation between <u> and <a> was that the vowel was in fact phonetically intermediate between /Λ/ and /æ/. This additional vowel occurred in items descended from Middle English ur, or and ir in closed syllables. Words ending in open syllables, such as sir and fur, had /a:/, as did items descended from ME er, such as earth and her (as well as items descended from ar such as part, cart, of course). The vowel /з:/ did not exist in the dialect until relatively recently.

During the last fifty years, the  vowel has more or less disappeared. In my 1968 study of Norwich (Trudgill 1974),  was recorded a number of times, but the overwhelming majority of words from the relevant lexical set had the originally alien vowel /з:/. Only in lower working class speech was  at all common in 1968, and then only 25 percent of potential occurrences had the short vowel even in informal speech. The vowel did not occur at all in my 1983 corpus (Trudgill 1988).

The older checked stressed vowel system of East Anglian English was thus:

The newer short vowel system looks as follows: