see · yfra the north study, north yfra problem dictionary
volume iv · pages 318–320 · ed. l. m.
a small upper-valley dialect; speakers approx. four hundred; the only language in which the household ghost has a vocative case.
The north noemic dialect is the spoken and (more occasionally) written speech of an arc of villages along the upper valley, from the terminus in the east to the lighthouse in the west. It is mutually intelligible with the lowland speech, with the courteous exception of certain household nouns which the north preserves and the lowlands do not. The dialect has no formal grammar in print; it has, however, a small body of letters, two cookbooks, and the keeper's diary, in which most of its peculiarities can be found.
The most often-cited feature of the dialect is its retention of the vocative case for persons not present. Where the lowlands distinguish only between addressed and described persons, the north has a third grade: the addressed-but-absent, used when speaking to someone whom the speaker knows is not there. The case is marked by the suffix -ra, and is the source of the celebrated yfra — literally, the absent-one (vocative).
The dialect's vocabulary leans toward the domestic and the elegiac. It has eleven words for varieties of late-afternoon light, four for the quality of an unanswered knock, and a single, much-defended word, plaintice, for a kindness that requires no recipient. The phonology is conservative: the long y survives where lowland speech has flattened to i; the soft p persists between vowels. Stress falls early.
Written records are scant. A churchwarden's account of the festival of seven lamps, dated 1689, contains six dialect words; a 1903 census-taker's footnote regards the dialect as "shy"; the 1957 memoir of m. t. is the longest continuous prose document. The dialect is not endangered, in the sense that nothing in particular is happening to it. It is simply small, and remains so.