WELCOME

Firstly, I must admit to being no more than an enthusiastic amateur when it comes to the Norfolk Dialect.   To be an expert, you need to have the better part of a century of rural Norfolk life behind you and have avoided the best efforts of both the educated and the educators to knock the rum stuff right out of you.   Mind you one never quite loses it, except in the case of my great uncle Charlie, but that's another story!

The Mardlingham Saga is published in up to six episodes a week, unless interrupted by holidays, offspring, grandchildren, writer's block or other factors beyond the author's control.

The story features the inhabitants of Little Mardlingham and its environs, a group of ficticious Norfolk villages and hamlets encompassing different types of East Anglian countryside.   The various adjoining villages are easily characterised by their names, Marsh Mardlingham is basically a small parcel of fenland, Mardlingham Broad has a decent sized stretch of water, Great Mardlingham has a proper highstreet with shops, and Little Mardlingham, where most of the action occurs, is a tiny hamlet with not much more than a church, pub, school, watermill, a scattering of cottages and a few farms.   In the middle of it all is Mardlingham Hall, known to the locals as The Big House, the major source of authority, leased or contracted farmland, rented cottages, employment and general angst.

The main characters are Stan, Jarge, Bea, Jimma, the Wicar and his sister Rosamunda, who serve as the main movers and shakers and of whom, at least one tends to be the anchor of any particular story.   They each have a pivotal role in the village community, which will become apparent as the stories progress.

Time-wise, the stories are set in a deliberately obscure decade somewhere in the nineteenth century, when things were far less industrial but with steam, electricity, gas and petroleum technologies looming on the horizon.   Many aspects of the Mardlingham area are well behind their times, but sometimes things from more advanced parts of the world break through to amaze, uplift or irritate the villagers.

Generally speaking, this sort of dialect stuff works best if you read it out loud, hopefully in the right accent and with a Norfolk intonation.   I've tried to use the grammar as well as the syntax, phrasing and spelling to assist with this.   The spelling is largely my own attempt at a phonetic interpretation of the dialect as I understand it.   I expect it will often vary from that of other Norfolk writers, but I've tried to make it work in such a way that it gives similar results whatever regional or world accent you have.

Please comment freely on the success or otherwise of my efforts.   My writing can only improve from my reading of your comments, and adverse ones are as welcome as any other sort.   I shall however delete or edit any that may offend my other readers, or are generally irrelevant to the subject under discussion.

Notes and translations are often available for passages of dialect - look for the links.   However, if you've worked out how some people shorten their messages when texting, you should find my spelling a doddle - at least, after a bit of practice.

Jarge, he say, “Wuss orl thus then?” an' Stan, he say, “We hint inn'ut terday.   Carn't yew weart?” - “Hint Oi inn'ut neetha?” say Bea, bu' th'Wicar, he dunt say narth'n.   He's usta weart'n.

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All Mardlingham characters are fictional
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