A great Yarmouth accent

REMEMBER I was trying to discover if the town of Great Yarmouth still has a distinctive accent? At the time I sent a quick email off to FOND – Friends of Norfolk Dialect. Today I had a response from Peter Trudgill – the author of a book on the county’s lingo as well as countless others on dialect, accent and sociolinguistics. 

“The Yarmouth accent certainly used to be somewhat distinct from that of the surrounding countryside,” he told me. “Unlike the rural accents, for instance, it resembled Norwich in having h-dropping. And when I did some research about this - in the 1970s - Lowestoft had a rather different accent again - for example the vowel in words such as coal, boat was different from the Yarmouth version.”

I feel the need to go and do some research of my own, particularly in those great old-fashioned boozers (like the Tudor Tavern, pictured) that Yarmouth seems to specialise in.