10/27/2023 0 Comments Great vowel shift and high tiders![]() ![]() Travelling up rivers – such as the Alde, Deben and Orwell – they would have encountered the indigenous Britons, who spoke an ancient Celtic language, related to Welsh. It is very likely that when the early Angles and Saxons first landed on British shores in the 5 th and 6 th Centuries AD, they would have come through the region today known as Suffolk. Jacek Fisiak and Peter Trudgill, Professors ![]() ‘East Anglia – the remote easternmost area of England – was probably home to the first ever form of language which can be called English… The county of Suffolk has a population of just 760,000, is largely agricultural, and those who move away from the area are often quick to disguise any trace of an accent.įor the purpose of this investigation, Danish shall provide the benchmark, while the focus shall be on the Suffolk dialect.īy pooling on perhaps what has become the largest bank of recordings of any one Suffolk speaker – a puppet fox called Mavis, I will argue that there are significant further traces of the first speakers of English to be unearthed in England’s easternmost county. It may be argued that Modern Danish – with just six million speakers, 86% of whom speak English as a foreign language – is not reliable for such an investigation as it has already been influenced considerably by English media and culture, but it is hardly likely that such an influence would have come from the Suffolk dialect. Striving for accuracy, the film not only tackles the events of the excavation in the 1930s, but also tries to get things right linguistically, by having its cast perfect the voices of the people it portrays.ĭespite the Suffolk Dialect having an undeniable role in the formation of other, much more widely spoken, varieties of English, both the county and the dialect remain surreptitious and with no recognised international significance. It tells the story of a historically enlightening archaeological find in the east of England – the Anglo-Saxon ship burial at Sutton Hoo. The Dig, a British film drama released on Netflix in 2021. In this (electronic) paper I will introduce both the Danish and Suffolk tongues, and by identifying their characteristics, attempt to answer which components (eg semantics, syntax and phonology) of Anglo-Saxon speech continue to the present day and contribute significantly to the accepted standards of English, as described by reputable dictionaries. If that is you, and you have got this far, please remember to kindly add a comment at the end of this piece. The investigation includes original, empirical findings that someone, somewhere, may find useful in their own study of the origins of English. The findings (foind’ns) nevertheless go some way to demonstrate important points in the evolution of language, proposing that while lexis is the most susceptible to change, phonology is possibly the least. ![]() This investigation does not pretend to satisfy this need but began simply as a way for me, as researcher, to show off my linguistic knowledge, or lack of. In the 2001 volume East Anglian English by Jacek Fisiak and Peter Trudgill, the point was made that this variety of English has furthermore received little attention from linguistic scholars over the years. In favour of such a comparison, rather than one with the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, ie Old English, is the fact that while the Suffolk dialect and Danish evolved simultaneously, they have done so largely independently of one another – each with a lexis that is unintelligible to the other. These are compared with Modern Danish, with which the Suffolk dialect shares a common ancestry. The research is conducted by analysing the characteristics of a variety of East Anglian English, known as Suffolk – taking its name from the county in the east of England where it is spoken. Spoken language is analysed on two levels: regional colloquial speech among people who like tractors and the international standard of English, which we prescribe as good practice for effective communication in a second or other language. This investigation explores one of the oldest dialects of English in order to discover which features of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons remain buried in common use today.
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