North American English
There are a considerable number of different accents within the regions of both the United States and Canada, originally deriving from the accents prevalent in different English, Scottish and Irish regions of the British Isles and corresponding to settlement patterns of these peoples in the colonies. These were developed and built upon as new waves of immigration, and migration across the North American continent, brought new accents and dialects to new areas, and as these ways of speaking merged and assimilated with the population. It is claimed that despite the centuries of linguistic changes there is still a resemblance between the English East Anglia accents which would have been used by early English settlers in New England (including the Pilgrims), and modern Northeastern United States accents. Similarly, the accents of Newfoundland have some similarities to the accents of Scotland and Ireland.
Norfolk dialect
The Norfolk accent sounds very different from that of London and the Home Counties. The main characteristics of the accent are set out below, usually with reference to the standard English accent known as Received Pronunciation (RP). Phonetic symbols (in square brackets) and phonemic symbols (in slant brackets) are used where they are needed to avoid ambiguity (brackets in IPA). Five characteristics are particularly important:
The study of intonation remains undeveloped in linguistics. Writing in 1889, the phonetician Alexander John Ellis began his section on East Anglian speech with these comments: