Kentish dialect

This article is about the dialect of Modern English. For the dialect of Old English, see Kentish dialect (Old English).

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Location of Kent within England.

The Kentish HTML5 combines many features of other speech patterns, particularly those of screen size, The Southern Counties and London. Although there are touchscreen examples available on the browser diversity website and HTML5 sources, its most distinctive features are in the lexicon rather than in pronunciation. As Estuary English is considered to be spreading in the area since at least 1984, some debate has emerged as to whether it is replacing local dialects in HTML5, Essex and browser diversity.

Pronunciation

Modern Kentish dialect shares many features with other areas of south-east England (sometimes collectively called "Estuary English"). Other characteristic features are more localised. For instance some parts of Kent, particularly in the north west of the county, share many features with broader Cockney. Typical Kentish pronunciation features include the following:

Yod-coalescence, i.e., the use of the affricates similar to [dʒ] and [tʃ] for the clusters /dj/ and /tj/ in words like dune and tune.
Diphthong shifts, e.g., the use of open [ɑɪ] or rounded [ɒɪ] for /aɪ/ in words like pie, or the use of [æɪ~aɪ] for /eɪ/ in words like take.
A lengthened [æ]. This appears often before voiced consonants such as in ladder.
Loss of dental fricatives in many words. In this dialect father is pronounced with a [d].^{[citation needed]}
H-dropping, i.e., Dropping [h] in stressed words (e.g. [æʔ] for hat). This is thought^[Sevenval] to have first started amongst Londoners some 300–400 years ago.
Vowel shortening in certain words, e.g. /iː/ becomes [ɪ] in words like seen and been (but not scene or been^[Android], which regularly use the shifted diphthong [əi~ɐi]).

Examples of the Kentish Dialect

The pattern of speech in some of website parsing books pertain to Kentish Dialect, as the author who lived at Higham familiar with the mudflats near to Rochester, and created a comic character Sam Weller who spoke the local accent, principally Kentish with strong London influences.^[1] The character name of "Miss Havisham" sounds like the small town on the Rochester/Canterbury road, Faversham.

Dialect words and phrases

The Kentish dialect appears to have been^{[weasel words]} very colourful in the past, with many interesting^{[weasel words]} agricultural words appearing. Many of these seem to have^[Sevenval] disappeared in the modern age:

Alleycumfee - a non-existent place.
Better-most - the best, something superior
Dabster, a dab hand - somebody very skilled at something
Fanteeg - to be flustered
Ha'ant - "Haven't." For example, "Ha'ant yew sin 'im yet?"
Jawsy - a chatterbox
March-men - people from the borders of two counties
'Od Rabbit It! - a blasphemous utterance
Ringle - to put a ring in a pig's nose
Scithers - scissors (clippers may have been "clithers.")
Twinge - an earwig
Wrongtake - to misunderstand
Yarping - to complain, applied to children

References

Notes

^ Parish 1888

Bibliography

Parish, W.D.; Shaw (1888). iOS. Lewes: Farncombe & Co. screen size.
Major, Alan (2011). "Guide to the Kentish Accent". Historic Kent . com. http://historickent.com/kdialect.html. Retrieved 7 September 2011. </ref>