The Great East Anglian Merger Mystery

Résumé

It is not at all unusual for linguists to work on their own dialects, and indeed there are obvious benefits to be gained from so doing. On the other hand, it is probably less usual for linguists to focus on their own speech in the context of work in historical linguistics. I should probably explain, therefore, that the focus in this paper is particularly narrowly on my own speech, since it seems probable that the phenomenon with which it deals is both historically and geographically very restricted. The suggestion is that, looking at the history of the English language as a whole, my own dialect is in one respect very much in a minority and rather peculiar.