Diphthongs

Norfuk /oʊ/ (home) has its vowel nucleus close to [ɔ], somewhat fronted, and usually with a perceptible schwa off-glide. The obvious outlier in this series (all from our male speaker) is the form y’know, which seems to be a borrowing from Australian or standard Norfolk English.

With the exception of the outlier (y’know), the formant trajectories for the off-glide in the diphthongs have a forward movement. This diphthong is quite a distinctive marker of Norfuk accent. However, it does not appear to be phonologically contrastive with Norfuk [ɔ:].

Norfuk [aʊ] (down, now, mouth) showed a good deal of phonetic variability. In general, it shows evidence of incomplete lowering of the nucleus, as in other conservative regional dialects (Scots English, Canadian English, etc.). The range of phonetic variation for [aʊ] can be illustrated with the following tokens from our male speaker:

To quantify this variation, we took formant measurements of the nucleus. The degree of lowering of the nucleus in the F1-F2 space corresponded with impressionistic transcription. Clearly, the word plough seems to be a borrowing from Australian English.

Norfuk [ɑɪ] evinces incomplete lowering of the nucleus, as also found in conservative regional English dialects. The environment for this incomplete lowering (often referred to as ‘Canadian Raising’ for its prevalence in Eastern Canadian English) is before voiceless obstruents in closed syllables. Our impressionistic transcriptions of [ɑɪ] tokens in stressed syllables showed some evidence of this rule in Norfuk.

Norfuk [eə] (which corresponds to Australian or Standard Norfolk English [eɪ]) is either a monophthong or an opening diphthong which is highly recognizable (as it is in Irish English). The range of variation illustrated in Table 6 is quite large, as the following tokens suggest. There was no obvious phonological conditioning for this variation.