yorkshire dialect

Location within England

Subdivisions

Consider:“There are no really sharp dialect boundaries

in England, and dialects certainly do not coincide with counties. There is really no such thing as an entirely separate, self-contained dialect."

Some pronunciation featuresYorkshire speakers tend to have no contrast

between /ʊ/ /ʌ/It is common for the words like none, one, once,

nothing, with an o in the spelling to be pronounced with /ɒ/ rather than the traditional /ʊ/.

Words like city and many are pronounced with a final [ɪ] although in the Sheffield area, it is more likely to be [ɛ]

In some areas, especially in the southern half of Yorkshire, there is a tendency to pronounce the phoneme /aʊ/ (as in mouth) as a monophthong [aː], often represented as "ah",

In West Riding dialect, the word right can also be pronounced with the same [ee] as meet, similar to an RP pronunciation of sweet.

A feature particular to Sheffield and the surrounding towns is the disyllabic pronunciations of "no" and "nowt" as [ne:ɔʊ] and [ne:ɔʊt].

In the West Riding , plural and past participle endings that are pronounced /ɪz/ and /ɪd/ in RP may be pronounced with a schwa, /ə/ (boxes can sound like boxers)

In the Barnsley area, there are some words where an /a/ becomes an /e/. For example, have is pronounced 'ev and master and is pronounced mester.

Vocabulary and grammarDefinite article reduction: shortening of the to a form

without a vowel, often written t'. Down the pub is pronounced downt pub.

The use of owt and nowt, derived from Middle English aught and naught and mean anything and nothing.

Many contractions ending with n't are shortened to single-syllable words, for example: dun't (doesn't), cun't (couldn't), shun't (shouldn't), wun't (wouldn't)…

The word us is often used in place of me or in the place of our (e.g. we should put us names on us property)

Some areas abbreviate I am not to I aren't rather than the usual I'm not.

The word self may become sen, e.g. yourself becomes thy sen, tha sen.

Remnants from the Vikings include the verb laik, to play. The younger generation tend to abbreviate this to lek, however

The use of now then, sometimes pronounced nah then as a greeting.

TV and Culture

Ted Hughes

Videohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=sB3ieNhEsDY