Were you interviewed about local accents by a university researcher in Norwich in 1968?
One aim of our research is to explore whether individuals can change their accents or dialects over their lifetime. To do that, we’re tracing original participants from Peter Trudgill’s 1968 Norwich study, which interviewed teenagers in schools and homes across the city about their speech.
We want to invite these individuals to share their speech with the world one last time in 2026. If you, or someone you know, might have taken part – for example a grandparent or great aunt/uncle – please get in touch.
Professor Peter Trudgill, 1968
Who are we looking for?
→ You were aged 11–15 and attended the City of Norwich School (CNS) in 1968, or were at another local school (see the next tab).
→ You remember being interviewed about your accent during school hours, or at home.
→ You were interviewed by either Peter Trudgill or Adrian Hannah — both Norwich-born male university researchers, aged 24 at the time.
What else do we know about the original participants?
→ Not all interviews took place in schools or in the same place. Interviews also took place in homes in:
Westwick, Heartseas Estate, Tuckswood, Thorpe Hamlet, Lakenham, West Earlham, Catton, Hellesdon and Thorpe (St Andrew).
→ Some participants had already left school for work or college by 1968. The schools/colleges previously attended by such participants included:
Hewett secondary school, St. Georges College, Thorpe House School, Wensum View School, Willow Lane Catholic School, Colman Road School, Lakenham School, Lakenham Secondary Modern School, Earlham School, larkston Junior School, Gurney Secondary Modern School, Colman Infant and Junior School.
Why finding the original participants matters
Peter Trudgill’s Norwich English study became one of the most important and widely cited pieces of accent-and-dialect research in Britain and, indeed, the world. The 1968 recordings contributed to university research that went on to shaped how language is taught and studied in universities and books worldwide, even if the participants never knew how far their contribution travelled.
Finding the original participants and recording their speech will allow us to measure how the Norwich dialect has changed since 1968. It also gives us a rare opportunity to study how an individual’s language changes across their lifetime; work that’s hard to do because tracing people decades later is so challenging.