William J. Kirwin

The West Country and Newfoundland: Some SED Evidence

The rich record of phonetic data in the Survey oj ~n,glisll Dialects of Harold Orton and his associates (1962-1971; SED) contains, scattered throughout its responses and illustrative material in Volume 4 (Orton and Wakelin 1967-68), evidence which parallels phonological features in Newfoundland.’ Although some of these Newfoundland pronunciations may have derived from other sources in English dialects, standard educated English, and the complex amalgam of Anglo-Irish, it is the purpose of this brief account to focus on phonemic, phonetic, and phonotactic details found in the three parts of Volume 4 of the SED, for the southwestern counties treated in this volume are the main areas which English emigrants left to settle in Newfoundland. For a similar treatment of English sources of US speech, see Kurath 1964. English speech in this island and Labrador has been evolving with a large degree of independence since immigration from the West Country slowed to a trickle after 1820 (Handcock 1977). In the centuries before that, from the time of the colonies and plantations in the seventeenth century, men and women came to the Newfoundland fisheries as transients or settlers from villages, towns, and ports of Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Hampshire, and the nearby areas (Figure 1). Evidence of the speech of seventeenthand eighteenth-century dialect speakers in the western counties is sparse and, since it is reported in antiquarians’ accounts and verse (Wright 18981905:VI.&dquo;Bibliography&dquo; 4-22; Wakelin 1977:45-46), it must be interpreted with great care. Almost no written material useful as proof of dialectal pronunciations of early Newfoundlanders exists in archives. An earlyseventeenth-century manuscript collection is peppered with spellings free of any normalizing tendencies, but the writers were obviously gentlemen, officials, and clerks using stereotyped London and Bristol styles (Willotighby c1610-34 ) . Speakers of the vernacular were for the most part simply not literate. It follows from these points that the West Country pronunciations in Newfoundland that we are interested in were established, and reinforced by annual transients, long before the first nineteenth-century attempts at