Norfolk Dialect Spoken Here

Broad Norfolk -- now it's just a fond memory

How many Norfolk mothers tell their children not to pingle over their wittles, or threaten to fetch them a sisserara without they hold their dullers?

Very few, I suspect. I have not heard the word "sisserara", meaning a sharp blow since I was a child. Great-grandmothers may still utter it, but I doubt whether any woman young enough to bear children would know what it meant.

That is why I have little patience with those who have lately been urging us to speak broad Norfolk. They are not conservationists, because there is little left to conserve. They are revivalists, unaware that language is what people speak, not what interfering romantics would like them to speak.

The generations who spoke broad Norfolk belong to the past. Only a hint of their unfathomable pronunciation persists, together with a few local idioms and grammatical peculiarities, such as "that do" for "it does."

Such survivals apart, broad Norfolk has narrowed almost to the point of oblivion since the day, a century ago, when the Lord Chief Justice called for an interpreter because he could not understand a Norfolk witness.

His bewilderment was shared by summer visitors to the coastal village of my childhood. half the old men of the village were fishermen, the other half farm labourers, and they might as well have been Hottentots for all the "furriners" could make of them.

I can recall many occasions on which I, at the age of 10 or thereabouts, had to act as interpreter for the doctors and lawyers who came in their chauffeur-driven cars to spend their holidays by the sea. They would not need my services today...

The English spoken by Norfolk people, whether old or young, can no longer be called a dialect. To qualify as a dialect, a person's speech needs a distinctive vocabulary, and it is precisely the old Norfolk vocabulary which has suffered the severest loss.

Words I heard as a child, but hear no longer, would fill a dictionary. A recent letter to this newspaper inquired about the word "minging." When I was young, the inquiry would have been unnecessary, because everybody knew the word.

Women did not knead their dough on tjose days. They minged it. If they watered it too freely, they would say that they had "minged the miller's eye out." To this day I can hear an old woman saying it.

Villagers were different people then, living a different life, following different customs, and speaking the language of their own sequestered world. It was the perfect instrument for communicating with each other. They seldom communicated with anybody else.

We should have to restore their way of life if we wished to restore their speech. If we owned a dickey and cart instead of a car or a bicycle, we might need words like "fungered" and "malahacked" to describe a worn-out donkey. If we dispensed with tractors, we might know what a "morfrey" was.

If we all turned out to bring in the harvest, we should know that the "skinker" was the lad who fetched the beer. If we stacked unthreshed corn in a barn, we should have a word for it -- "goof." If we exchanged our electric cookers for the old-style kitchen ranges, we should have fires that "squindered."

We should call a slovenly girl a "shammock" and a listless daydreamer a "dardledumdue." We should feed our invalids on "sunkets" and ourselves on such gastronomic delights as "skuzzle" and "pinpatches."

The past, as somebody said, is a foreign country. The broad Norfolk spoken over my cradle was as foreign as they come. Asking us to revive it makes no more sense than asking Italians to speak Latin or the English to mimic Chaucer.

Let us not delude ourselves. Broad Norfolk is well on its way to the limbo inhabited by the languages of Nineveh and Tyre. It cannot be summoned back. I hope that makes a "larrup" of sense.

(original article appeared in The Eastern Daily Press, July 2nd 1993)