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LOST IN TRANSLATION

Today’s street language is more colourful than most of us would like – but not if you live in Norfolk, where the old and the young are combining to safeguard the local dialect, and put real Norfolk back into the local natter.

It all started in the early nineties, following a TV drama about the Queen’s local estate, at Sandringham. “The dialect the BBC used was atrocious,” says Peter Brooks, Secretary to the Friends of Norfolk Dialect (FOND).

It was what Peter dismissively calls ‘mumerset’ – how perhaps Bush House thought everyone beyond reach of the capital spoke. It had the caricature ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ you might associate with The Archers, or a stateless country bumpkin, but had no resonance with people from Norwich or King’s Lynn.

Letters of protest were filed in the local press, and phone calls of disgust rang in to the radio station, all complaining about the misrepresentation of their proud regional accent that has been uncommonly preserved by the area’s largely rural and static population. And when a public meeting was held to discuss the issue, despite it being a wet autumn Sunday afternoon, 80 people turned out to raise their frustration. Something had to be done, everyone agreed, and so FOND was formed.

Since then the group - made up mostly of Norfolk natives - haven’t wasted time. With money from the National Lottery they have hunted the landscape making recordings of ‘the old boy on the farm’, and other fine examples of their dialect. (The results - BBC take note - are available in the county’s archives.) And realising today’s young were unaware of the full range of the Norfolk tongue, which might therefore be at risk of dying out, they secured funding for their long-held ambition – to introduce an understanding and appreciation of Norfolk dialect in the county’s schools.

Under the ‘Lost in Translation’ project, which also has the assistance of the County Council’s Children’s Services, children from ten primary and secondary schools are visiting elderly neighbours, relatives and those in care homes, to collate examples of their neighbourhood dialect. Then, later this summer they then will make a production of their work, to share and spread what they have learnt with the wider community.

“People tend to see the Norfolk dialect quite negatively,” says Emma Perchard, an English Teacher at Wymondham High School, one of the participants. Indeed, people like her mother, she admits, taught their children to hide it. “But it would be a shame to see it die out,” says the now clean-speaking Emma. “The project is about seeing our dialect more positively, and keeping words alive.”

“It teaches the children that dialect is something to be proud of - not wrong and to be corrected,” says Kirsten Parker, the Head of English at Diss High School. “It gives them a connection with the place they were born – which they don’t always have,” adds Trudy McGilvray, from Firside Middle School, in Hellesdon.

Norfolk nuances, it turns out, stretch right across our language. Their pronunciation, for example, does not have double vowel sounds. So a tutor sounds more like a car horn - a ‘tooter’ - and if you had a computer tutor you’d probably abbreviate them to a ‘pooter tooter!’ As for grammar, the word order can be different, and there is no ‘s’ in the third person singular. So they would say ‘he run home when she cook the meal,’ that sort of thing. And incidentally, during the war testing people’s pronunciation of villages such as Wymondham (which the locals pronounce Windum) and Costessey (Cossy) were used to identify people suspected of being Germans.

But it is the dialect’s potentially colourful vocabulary that has really captured the children’s interest. The most famous example, a ‘Bishy-barney-bee’, is the truly local word for a ladybird. (There was once a Bishop Barnabas, of Norwich, who wore a similarly coloured cloak) Also popular and amusing are the ‘tittermorter’, which is what children might call a seesaw; ‘trickalating,’ which means decorating; and ‘slant and dicular’, which is something not squarely hung. There is also a Dutch influence in words like ‘dwile,’ which means flannel cloth.

“There is no rule for spelling,” Peter Brooks reassures me, as we move on to more guessable, everyday phrases: “Fair ter middlin,” “the Best part of sum tyme,” and “Cum on in out onnit” (Come out of the rain).

To assist the schools with their productions they have been allocated four days of help from a local theatre company who specialise in re-using oral material. And so great has been the schools’ energy and imagination that the company have found themselves helping out with everything from puppets, models and exhibitions, to stage performances and even animation films. “It’s proving quite a challenge,” admits Eve Stubbing, of Spin Off Theatre.

But Norfolk dialect does not just involve mastering new words, pronunciation and phrases, says Eve. The schoolchildren will have to learn that it also involves structuring thoughts differently. So, rather than just diving in when they talk, someone speaking true Norfolk might sit back and, after a little pause for organising their thoughts, say, “That were like this….”


For more information visit www.norfolkdialect.com

The schools’ work will be displayed at the Norfolk Show (28-29th June) and in the Norwich Forum (10-15th July)


 

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