The Pocket Yorkshire English

The dialects of English still spoken in Yorkshire, known collectively as Broad Yorkshire, Tyke or Yorkie, are both colourful and instantly recognisable. This handy beginners 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 tint int tin, meaning it isnt 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 dont 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, Im avin a reet grand dee!

Never say our; you say us Wots fr us tea, Mutha? Yorkshires a friendly place anyone you meet could be love, pal or fella. And do speak to everyone youre not in London! So, dont be taken aback if someone hails you with Mornin, pet, reet grand day, init?

The roots of Yorkshires 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 Brontës Wuthering Heights, also in Charles Dickens Nicholas Nickleby, among other classic works.

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