About the Book
What is Yorkshire dialect? In the 1920s, when most working-class people tended to speak dialect, a doctor in the Keighley area wrote an account for the Yorkshire Dialect Society of some of his experiences with his patients. He described how on one occasion he went to the home of an old farmer who was very seriously ill and thought to be dying. He examined him, and having found no perceptible pulse he turned to the wife and said: 'I'm sorry love. But I'm afraid poor John has passed away'. 'Nay, doctor', came a feeble voice from the man in the bed. 'Ah ammot dee-ad yet!' 'Thee 'od thi tongue, lad', snapped his wife. 'T' doctor knaws better ner thee!' This true story serves to illustrate an important point about Yorkshire dialect. In recent years it has largely disappeared from everyday life, and real dialect speakers are now an endangered species. But, like the old chap in this story, dialect is not dead yet. True, it is not in a healthy state, and everywhere it is being replaced by what we in the Dialect Society call 'local speech', which retains the accent and intonation of earlier days, but hardly any of the vocabulary and idiom which makes real dialect so distinctive.
Somebody from London, for example, might assume that Yorkshire people who speak with a strong accent (we keep our vowels open in Yorkshire!) are 'talking dialect'. But it is nothing of the kind. If they were to speak the traditional dialect - the everyday speech of earlier generations - 'off-comed-uns' would hardly be able to understand a word of it. Does this mean, then, that real dialect, if not yet actually extinct, will eventually become what we call a dead language? I'm afraid it will. The continuing evolution of colloquial language makes this inevitable. And I do not share the view that dialects do not die, but only change. When the change reaches such a point that the local speech scarcely resembles its earlier form, we must accept that a demise has taken place. It is no use saying that Italian, French, and Spanish, for example, are simply changed forms of Latin. They have their own identity, and look back on Latin as a deceased, though honourable, parent - a dead language, in the sense that it is no longer spoken. Yet all is not lost. We do not disregard Latin, Greek, Sanskrit and so forth, just because nobody still speaks such languages.
Nor do we neglect Chaucer just because nobody speaks Middle English any more. In the case of Yorkshire dialect, we are in a happier position. A minority still speaks it, and even more still understand it and remember it with affection. So we have an opportunity we must not miss. While Yorkshire dialect is still known and loved - and is at least within living memory - we should do our best to pin it down, while we still have time. That is the motivation for my own years of talks and books on our dialect. I am, I suppose, a linguistic conservationist. Parallel with our commendable effort to conserve buildings, beauty spots and archaeological items, I believe we need to research and display the artifacts of the language we call dialect. In a sense this book constitutes a kind of literary museum, with its specimens set out in roughly chronological order. But it is much more than that. These specimens can be brought to life again - either through personal reading, or through being read aloud by one of our surviving dialect-speakers. To hear dialect read competently and enthusiastically can be a delightful experience.
Before we go any further, though, we should clear up two possible misapprehensions, often found amongst those who are not familiar with Yorkshire dialect. The first is the idea that dialect is a quaint and comical kind of speech - and a corruption of normal English. This may be true of what sometimes is mistaken for dialect - a slovenly, lazy way of talking, full of bad grammar and slang - much of this of recent origin. True dialect, far from being a deviation from the official standard, is essentially an earlier form of English, a language in its own right, as we shall see in the following chapter briefly outlining its origins. Although it is closely associated with humor - as many of these items will show - the actual dialect, blunt and vivid though it may be, is not funny in itself, nor are Yorkshire dialect speakers necessarily stand-up comedians. The second fallacious idea is that dialect is just a matter of curious words and phrases.
This is an impression unintentionally given by the BBC project Voices (2005), which - no doubt inevitably - gave a great deal of attention to different words used for the same thing in different parts of the country, along with interesting local terms and expressions. What we must not overlook is that dialect, particularly in Yorkshire, has produced a considerable body of literature - poetry and prose written entirely in dialect, not merely conversational snatches of it used in novels or plays. We have, in fact, a whole repository of printed dialect material, most of it from an age when 'broad Yorkshire' was a living language. Much of it is light and ephemeral, some of it of real literary merit - but all of it is of linguistic and sociological interest. It is undeniably part of our culture, and because there is, I am convinced, more dialect material to be found in Yorkshire than in any other county, it really deserves to be collected and presented in the form of a book like this. This is not to say that I regard this as a definitive anthology.
I have agonized over which items should be included, very much aware of some I reluctantly had to leave out because space is obviously limited in a book designed to stimulate interest rather than give an exhaustive coverage. I have, however, tried to make a representative selection, and to strike a balance between the serious and humorous, between town and country - and between the two major divisions of West Riding dialect on the one hand, and North and East Riding dialect on the other. Above all, I have made a point of giving the original, authentic form of this material - not the half-remembered, misquoted versions sometimes passed off as genuine. Readers who are not used to Yorkshire dialect (and perhaps even some who are) may not at first find all this easy reading. But be patient. You will soon get accustomed to it, and the glossary at the back will help you with the words you may not know. The contents of this book are, of course, a world away from what most people read today, when fiction and fantasy predominate.
But real life can be at least as entertaining, especially if we are enabled to glimpse the realities of days gone by, when life was harsh and restricted, yet paradoxically touched with joy. Moreover, in an age of electronic globalisation, when everything is becoming monotonously the same, it is good to assert the distinctive characteristics of our various regions and counties, and a refreshing change to experience what I believe to be the specially piquant and heart-warming flavor of the three ancient Ridings of Yorkshire. A brief history of Yorkshire dialect: Yorkshire dialect has its roots - like the English language as a whole - in the speech of the Germanic tribes who invaded and settled in our land in the fifth century. It is often incorrectly stated that our ancestors here in Yorkshire were called Saxons. But these settled in the south - in Essex ('the land of the East Saxons'), Sussex (the South Saxons) and so on. In the Midlands, East Anglia and the North were the more numerous Angles - according to St Bede, so called because they came from the angle of land we now call Schleswig-Holstein.
It was these ancestors of ours after whom England is named, literally meaning 'the land of the Angles'. We describe the speech of pre-Norman England as Old English or Anglo-Saxon, but there was a difference between the way the Angles and Saxons spoke (the origin of the north/south difference today) and also a difference within the vast territory occupied by the Angles. The speech of their kingdom of Mercia, which covered the Midlands, gradually spread into Yorkshire and formed the basis of West Riding dialect, spoken approximately from the valley of the Wharfe southwards. The speech of the kingdom of Northumbria (all the land north of the Humber) formed the basis of the North Riding and East Riding dialects, which are similar to each other. Following the custom of the Yorkshire Dialect society, these are abbreviated as WR, and NR and ER (and sometimes NER when the dialect could be from either area). As will be obvious from the items in this book, there is a considerable difference between WR and NER dialects.
In general the speech of the West Riding is louder and more incisive, perhaps reflecting life in the mills, mines and steelworks, when people had to shout to make themselves heard above the industrial noise. The speech of the North and East Ridings seems to be quiet and gentle in comparison, reflecting life in the countryside. There are also some differences in vocabulary. For example, a friend of mine, when a child, had a grandma in the West Riding who gave her spice. When she visited her other grandma in the East Riding she received goodies - both words meaning 'sweets'. There are also differences of style. In WR the familiar form 'thou' is tha (or ta), in NER thoo. In WR 'I am' is Ah'm or Aw'm; in NER it is Ah's. The biggest difference, however, is in vowel sounds, as illustrated by the following, which serve as a pattern: WR NER dahn doon - down schooil skeeal - school dooant deeant - don't speyk speak - speak coit cooat - coat However, the two main branches of Yorkshire dialect do have much in common, and both are rich in Anglo-Saxon sounds. For example, words like lang (long) and finnd (find) preserve the vowels we still find in modern German.
Many Anglo-Saxon words which have disappeared from Standard English, or changed their meaning, can still be heard in Yorkshire dialect. To be starved is not to be very hungry, but to be very cold (from Anglo-Saxon steorfan, 'to suffer intensely'). Shoppers who say 'Nay, Ah can't thoil t' brass' don't mean they can't afford the money, but that they don't think they can justify spending the money on that particular item - and this shade of meaning in thoil (Anglo-Saxon tholian, 'to bear, endure') has been lost from Standard English. Even when Yorkshire folk used to say 'Ah axed 'im' (I asked him) they were not ignorantly putting the 'k' before the 's', but unconsciously preserving the Anglo-Saxon verb acsian (to ask). The next stage of development was brought about by the invasion of the Vikings in the ninth century - the Danes settling in the flatter area around York and dividing the county into three Ridings, a word derived from the Scandinavian thrithjungr (a third).
The Norwegians, or Norsemen, came from their settlement in Ireland and settled in the Dales - in Swaledale, for example, where we find their words in places like Keld, Muker and Gunnerside (Gunnar was a hero in their sagas). Viking words are found all over Yorkshire, in place-names ending with -by, -thorpe and -thwaite, for example, and in common words in our dialect, such as addle (to earn), lig (to lie), laik (to play), stee (ladder), teem (to pour), tyke (dog), ey up! (look out!) etc. You may notice that sometimes the dialect used for 'child' is bairn. This is the Anglo-Saxon word bearn. At other times it may be barn. This is the Viking form of the word. The final stage of the evolution of English followed William the Conqueror's invasion of 1066. These French-speaking Normans (originally Norsemen who had settled in northern France) imposed their authority on the whole country, and French was spoken to such an extent that it attached itself to the existing mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Viking, forming about a third of what we call Middle English, the language in which Chaucer wrote in the late fourteenth century.
A few French terms survived in Yorkshire dialect which are unknown in Standard English. My own favorite is buffit (a low stool), which was the original meaning of buffet in Norman French. For a while there was no standard form of English, only the varieties found in different parts of the country. But from 1476 Caxton's printing press began to disseminate the kind of English spoken and written by educated Londoners. It was also spread by people like government officials and merchants travelling from London into all parts of the country. Soon the local dialects were being regarded as an inferior form of speech - ironically so, because what became known as Standard English, along with Received Pronunciation, had itself started out as a mere dialect - that of the London area. Now it was busy supplanting all the other dialects, and a distinction was increasingly being made between 'official' English and the speech of industrial workers, labourers, servants, fishermen, farmers and country-people. The great enemy of dialect (which from the linguistic point-of-view was just as good as Standard English and in some ways more subtle) was education.
Once children had been taught to read and write they were expected to talk like all the others who could read and write. Indeed, most of the words they used in everyday dialect - words like summat and nowt, for example - they would be unlikely to find in print at all. As early as the 1850s we can see in reports of school inspectors that there was a deliberate policy of discouraging all dialect and strong local accent. Unknown in schools, there had been a few isolated attempts to put dialect into print - John Ray's Collection of Northern Words (1674), George Martin's A Yorkshire Dialogue (1683) and the first printed version by John Aubrey of The Lyke Wake Dirge (1686). In the early nineteenth century, influenced by Robert Burns, the first real Yorkshire dialect poetry was published, written by a self-educated farmer, David Lewis. But it was the emergence of the dialect almanacks - the first published by Abel Bywater in Sheffield in 1830 - which gave vernacular speech a real shot in the arm. For the first time ordinary people could see their native speech in print, take a pride in it, have fun with it and keep it alive.
No fewer than eighteen different dialect almanacks were published in the West Riding alone - all at easily affordable prices. Though the humor in them has dated considerably, they provide us with plenty of evidence about the daily life and outlook of dialect-speaking communities. Academics were now taking an interest in dialect. The most important of these was Joseph Wright (1855-1930). At the age of six he started work as a donkey-boy in a quarry at Windhill, Shipley, and then moved to Salt's Mill. Illiterate until he was fifteen, he then started on a remarkable programme of self-education, eventually specializing in languages and becoming Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford. He never lost touch with his Yorkshire roots, and in 1892 published his Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill, which his university colleagues at first thought was a joke - until they realized that Professor Wright was treating Yorkshire dialect as a subject worthy of serious study. 'Ahr Jooa', as he was affectionately known, finally published his monumental six-volume English Dialect Dictionary in 1905.
This famous dictionary was based on collections of words and phrases made by committees all over the country. The one in Bradford, having finished its work for Professor Wright in 1897, decided not to disband, but to continue to encourage interest in dialect by founding the Yorkshire Dialect Society, now the oldest in the world. This society has for more than a century arranged meetings all over the county, at which members can read poems and stories, often their own work. It has also published a considerable amount of dialect material, and still issues the respected academic journal Transactions and the creative dialect writing of the Summer Bulletin. One of its editors, Professor F W Moorman, was the first to make a collection of dialect poems, published in 1916. Dialect continues to be heard at various other meetings in Yorkshire, such as those of the University of the Third Age, and the East Riding Dialect Society, with its own publications, founded in 1984.
Apart from such meetings, there is little public utterance of Yorkshire dialect, and gone are the days of popular recitations by John Hartley and Ben Preston, plays by such writers as J R Gregson, the dialect patter of such comedians as Tom Foy and Albert Modley, and, later, Charlie Williams. Nor do we have such radio and television personalities as Wilfred Pickles (1907-1978) to popularise West Riding speech. Similarly, the old almanacks, followed by dialect writers in the papers, such as 'Buxom Betty' in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus, have all disappeared. However, the writing and performance of dialect still has an outlet through some of the festivals, notably the Mrs Sunderland Competition (founded in 1889) in Huddersfield Town Hall. What of the state and status of dialect today? The war of attrition against dialect, and the pressure to conform to a standard, has continued. The real anti-dialect influence nowadays is the non-stop flow of language from radio and television - not so much Standard English and Received Pronunciation as estuary English, with its un-Yorkshire style, often full of slick cliches and predictable, conventional phrases.
It is true that television soap operas include plenty of northern speech, including that of Yorkshire. There is hardly ever any actual dialect, but, at least, northern vowels and intonation are being heard more and more. To speak educated English with a Yorkshire accent is becoming generally acceptable. To speak real dialect, however, is likely to be responded to with amused tolerance, as something ignorant and incomprehensible. There is no doubt that dialect has suffered increasingly rapid erosion - through the pressure of the media, through fundamental changes in everyday life, especially a new social mobility, and the disappearance of traditional communities dependent on mills and mines, on farming and fishing. Yet although dialect is now in serious, even terminal, decline, interest in it seems to be experiencing a revival. It is as though we have at last realized that Yorkshire dialect really is an important and intriguing part of our heritage - a point this anthology seeks to demonstrate.
Table of Contents:
1. What is Yorkshire Dialect? 2. A brief History of Yorkshire Dialect 3. Pronunciation and Spelling 4. Favourite Yorkshire Sayings 5. Yorkshire Dialect Verse 6. Yorkshire Dialect Prose 7. Bibliography 8. Glossary
About the Author :
Arnold Kellett is a well-known speaker and writer on Yorkshire dialect. Though born and bred in the West Riding, he has for half a century been identified with Knaresborough in North Yorkshire, where he was head of modern languages at King James's School, and is now a Freeman. A vice-president of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, whose journal 'Transactions' he edited for ten years, Dr Kellett has also written many dialect features for 'Dalesman' magazine, and five other books on the lore and language of Yorkshire.
