smoothing. as in first is pronounced or : . Since the mid-20th century, this very open realisation has largely disappeared, at least in urban East Anglia. is traditionally , a narrower glide than RP, but since the second half of the 20th century, a backer realisation is favoured, . Consonants Yod-dropping occurs after all consonants. Yod-dropping after alveolar consonants () is found in many English accents, and widely in American pronunciation, so that words like "tune", "due", "sue", "new" are pronounced , , , , sounding like "toon", "doo", "soo", "noo". Additionally, in East Anglia, yod-dropping is found after any consonant, and this seems to be a unique regionalism. Therefore, RP is pronounced as Norfolk (where C stands for any consonant). For example, "beautiful", "few", "huge", "accuse" have pronunciations that sound like "bootiful", "foo", "hooge", "akooz". A parallel case involves the vowel of : in RP the word is pronounced with initial , but Norfolk speakers omit the and smoothing results in so that "cure" sounds like "cur". H-dropping is rarer than in most other parts of England. (However, H-dropping is indeed typical in urban Norwich.) "Clear L" is possible in all contexts in speakers born before 1920. In contexts where RP pronounces as "dark L" , these older Norfolk speakers have "clear L" so that the sound in 'hill' and 'milk' sounds similar to the clear L heard at the beginning of words such as 'lip'. The process known as L-vocalization (whereby, for example, the in 'hill', 'well', 'help' is pronounced as a back rounded vowel like ) is not as widespread in this accent as elsewhere in Southern England, though it is increasingly prevalent in Suffolk. Prosody In addition to the above phonological features, East Anglian English also has a distinct rhythm. This is due to the loss of unstressed syllables associated with East Anglian speakers. There appears to be no agreed framework for describing the prosodic characteristics of different dialects (see Intonation). Writing in 1889, the phonetician Alexander John Ellis began his section on East Anglian speech with these comments: There does appear to be agreement that the Norfolk accent has a distinctive rhythm due to some stressed vowels being longer than their equivalents in RP and some unstressed vowels being much shorter. Claims that Norfolk speech has intonation with a distinctive "lilt" lack robust empirical evidence. Norwich accent In addition to above features, one specific accent