The Pocket Yorkshire English

The dialects of English still spoken in Yorkshire, known collectively as Broad Yorkshire, Tyke or Yorkie, are both colorful and instantly recognizable. This handy beginner’s guide to ‘how to speak Yorkshire’ will have you giving Sean Bean or Jodie Whittaker a run for their money in no time.

First, you have to drop your Hs, from ‘has’ and ‘her’ for example – ‘as and ‘er. Then, the Ts need to go, from ‘that’ and ‘cat’ for example, to be replaced with a slight H sound, the so-called glottal stop – tha’ and ca’ – while ‘the’ becomes simply t’. A famous example (which no one ever actually says) is ‘t’in’t in’t tin, meaning ‘it isn’t in the tin’. In a similar way ‘with’ becomes ‘wi’. Accents may differ throughout the Dales, but Ts and Hs are dropped throughout Yorkshire.

And don’t bother with the G in any -ing ending. Gs at the end of words count for nothin’. The ‘ay’ sound in a word, like ‘day’, becomes ‘ee’, as do some i sounds – ‘right’, for example, becomes ‘reet’. So, in Yorkshire, you might say, ‘I’m ‘avin’ a reet grand dee!’

Never say ‘our’; you say ‘us’ – Wot’s f’r us tea, Mutha? Yorkshire’s a friendly place – anyone you meet could be ‘love’, ‘pal’ or ‘fella’. And do speak to everyone – you’re not in London! So, don’t be taken aback if someone hails you with ‘Mornin’, pet, reet grand day, i’n’it?’

The roots of Yorkshire’s dialects can be traced back to the mixing of Anglo-Saxon speakers with Scandivanian settlers from the eighth to the eleventh centuries. In order to understand each other, they dropped gender, word endings and complex conjugations from their languages. The resulting simplified Anglo-Saxon/Middle English lingua franca spread throughout England, more rapidly following the Norman Conquest. Yorkshire is the birthplace of what is now the international language of modern English.

Along the way, the dialects have featured in the work of the Brontës, who were born and lived in Yorkshire, famously in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, also in Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby, among other classic works.

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