Dialect

I am proud to be a Yorkshireman. Last weekend at the Hull City game some of our fans chanted towards the West Brom end - "Yorkshire! Yorkshire!" It's a chant I have heard many times before and one to which I have often happily added my own voice. It's as if to say - we are from Yorkshire and we are proud of it and wherever you come from cannot compare with our marvellous county.

Both sets of grandparents were Yorkshire born and bred, my parents were both Yorkshire born - Mum in the old West Riding, Dad in the North Riding and they spawned me in the heart of the East Riding. Our daughter sometimes bemoans the fact that she has no exotic links like some of her friends but I remind her that she is herself of "mixed race" because I broke the mould by deigning to marry a Lincolnshire lass!

Beverley Minster from The Westwood.

Yorkshire is a big county with numerous discernible accents/dialects. In Sheffield they mock the Barnsley accent and in East Yorkshire they mock the urban drawl of Hull. Up in North Yorkshire there's still a range of accents from the Dales to the coast and up to Teeside and then there's the Bradford accent and the Leeds way of speaking. In my village when I was a boy the farmers spoke in a manner which sometimes harked back to the Danes and Vikings. One word I have always remembered is "yitten" which roughly translated means scared.

So with all this variety, it sometimes seems odd to come across pieces of writing that claim to have been written in THE Yorkshire dialect because there's really no such thing. Such a piece of writing I have pasted below. In it, the speaker or writer advises how to make a good cup of tea in the days before teabags were invented:-

Nah then, tha wants t'empty t'owd watter aht o' kettle and fill 'er up wi' fresh watter afoor tha puts it on t' ob. Get taypot reet nicely warmed and dry insahd, and then get thi tay in. Nah, as soon as t'kettle comes reet on t' boil an' not a second afoor or aftah, get watter pooared in t' pot.

Dooan't furget! Allus tek t' pot to t' kettle and not t' kettle to t'pot. Lerrit mash a fair wahl an' then girrit a stir afoor tha pooars it aht. Nah, thez summas puts milk in fust an' summas put tay in fust . To oor way o' thinkin', t'impooartant thing is to mek certain tha's med plenty fooar secon'elpin's!

I expect that some of my American visitors will be baffled by such a version of English. For me the way I speak is part of my identity and in spite of a university education, travels around the world and a long career in teaching, I am glad that I have hung on to my vowels and the dialect words and Yorkshire undulations that will still tell the sensitive listener almost exactly where I am from. "You're not from Beverley are you?"