Talk:Yorkshire dialect

Scarborough

Scarborough accent hard to understand? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 81.153.135.127 (talk • contribs) 21:49, 21 April 2005 (UTC)

Just for the record, I find it hard to understand. Don't know about everyone else. It's getting towards the Middlesbrough twang - as you'd expect, seeing as it's in that direction. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.56.22.47 (talk • contribs) 20:07, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

It's not that difficult, pretty similar to most of the NER accents. The bit missed here is the assumption that all Yorkshire accents are the same, normally there's a strong division into West Riding (WR) and North and East Riding (NER) accents. Even these accents can be divided by area, e.g. Hambleton is different from York, though both are NER. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.15.128.97 (talk • contribs) 23:39, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

'a' and 'o' sounds in NER

One item missed in the vowels section is the different 'a' and 'o' used in the NER flavour of the Yorkshire dialect, which is more akin the more Northern accents (e.g. Geordie, Mackem). For example the 'a' in 'cake' or the 'o' in 'coke'. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.15.128.97 (talk • contribs) 23:31, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

West Riding examples

Hi @Fendditokes: I find the West Riding examples useful, but do you have any sources that they are coming from? This might help with specifics about phonetics. It also seems to be from a particular type of speech (early 20th century, perhaps)? Any minutiae could be useful to know, and certainly citations are desired. Thanks! Wolfdog (talk) 18:20, 12 April 2024 (UTC)

Hello, I gave these examples as a council member of the Yorkshire Dialect of a generalised and slightly more conservative West Riding dialect though still modern so I find the changes to the "20th" century dialect somewhat confusing here, since it implies broad and slightly conservative pronunciation features (retention of older /a/ in "mak", "tak" versus recent "mek", "tek") is outdated by today's standards. The corrections that have been given are also strangely incorrect, such as t' being pronounced at the beginning of utterances or after /s/.

For some of these sentences I just thought them up on the spot as a dialect speaker, for others I took direct textual examples of dialect. For those texts I took directly and can remember the source of: "it mud ha bin war" is from Rod Dimbleby's flyers on the Let's Talk Tyke course running currently, "hug a poak...", "cowd watter" and "mak moor brass aat on't" are from Arnold Kellett's Basic Guide to Broad Yorkshire, "yo can leead a hoss to t'troff" is from the earliest dialect recordings of Yorkshire dialect, which can be found on Internet Archive. "Here's hauf a craan" is from Tony Capstick comes home (findable in Yorkshire dialect Classics by A.Kellett). "Experience is a dear schooil" is from a John Hartley passage.

"Them at eyts t'moast puddin" hardly needs any introduction with how well-known a saying it is.

As for phonology obviously there is some sparcity in data collection on broad dialect specifically since not everyone speaks it and even then not all the time and to varying degrees. However, for general features such as long vowel realisations in traditional WR dialect there's data by Wakelin as far as good modern sources.

I hope this has cleared some things up.

the Fendditokes (talk) 02:37, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

Hi, I'm a bit lost on certain fronts. You say you provide a generalised and slightly more conservative West Riding dialect but are confused that "20th century" implies broad and slightly conservative pronunciation features. Right. Isn't that what you just said?

Although I appreciate your personal knowledge as a native speaker, editors are expected to cite reliable sources when asked. I also appreciate the mention of Dimbleby, Kellett, Capstick, etc., but can you actually cite those sources (assuming they're credible) with page numbers please? Also, do you know a source describing no t' being pronounced at the beginning of utterances or after /s/. It's not that I doubt you, but that the page currently doesn't provide those details, so adding such (with a source) would be very illuminating for readers. My foray into DAR research suggests the phenomenon is quite complicated and what you may hear as a lack of /t/ at the beginning of words is feasibly a glottal stop.

Could you elaborate on why you feel that using slashes (phonemic transcription) is justified here? Unless we establish a page-wide phonemic transcription for Yorkshire dialect, we're probably confusing readers, for example by having the Phonology section describe certain variants (in square brackets, you'll notice) and then phonemicizing that in your examples in some inconsistent ways. For example, phonetically, home as [uəm] is phonemically something like /oːm/ if we establish a Yorkshire standard or /əʊm/ if we use RP as our standard or /oʊm/ if we use WP diaphonemic transcription. Instead of having to argue all this out, why don't we just go with my original change and use square brackets in your somewhat-narrow examples, which we both agree are based upon a particular era and sub-region of Yorkshire?

"Them at eyts t'moast puddin" hardly needs any introduction with how well-known a saying it is. This statement presupposes a lay reader's knowledge, which is unwise. For example, as an American, I'm not familiar with the phrase at all.

Thanks for processing all my comments! I hope you take it all in good faith. The article needs a lot of cleanup in general. Wolfdog (talk) 23:13, 13 April 2024 (UTC)

By conservative features I mean of older but still living speakers. An example of a truly outdated feature from the beginning of the 20th, for example, would be use of /eː/ for ME /ɛː/ in polysyllabic words of French origin such as "dacent" rather than modern "deacent".

For those sentences I can cite directly, I can cite the books where they were collated. I am unsure however about a pamphlet.

For DAR, yes the article can be rendered as a glottal stop allophonically but it's still not realised phonetically in the contexts given. Like in any English dialect with the presence of allophonic glottal stops, you phonotactically cannot have a glottal stop after /s, d, t, z/ in the same syllable in coda and you cannot have /t/ as a glottal stop in syllable onset.

The only exception to pronunciation of DAR is the Holme Valley area where, like in Lancashire dialect, /θ/ may be found before words with initial vowels, but that's a different phoneme.

For the square brackets Vs slanted: I understand that creating a phonemic table would prove helpful, but there hasn't been establishment of phoneme data in West Riding dialect by linguists as in, say, Scots. The only thing that comes close to consistently mapping out proper phonemic data was work on the Windhill variety of WR dialect by Joseph Wright, but this was before IPA in the 1880s.

I take issue with the use of sets like the ones proposed for home. Firstly it implies that dialect developed from Standard English in London which obviously isn't true. Secondly Standard English vowel sets don't map very well at all onto West Riding dialect if any traditional dialect. Yes /uə/ is the most commonly found equivalent of the /əʊ̯/ GOAT in RP, but then there are many examples for instance of Standard English words in the GOAT set which use other regularly occuring vowels in their cognates in dialect. You can have /oː/ as in "knaw", /ɒɪ̯/ as in "coit", /ɒ/ as in "ovver", /ə/ as in "windo" etc...

I will have a look at using sources I can give for those sentences that have them and review what research that has been conducted on WR dialect phonology for use in sources, but until then I ask that no changes be made to the transcriptions as they are.

I will also need to address the phonology section when I have time, since although some traditional features are given, many features are non-traditional and this is confusing as to what Yorkshire's dialects exactly are. I believe it's best that this page focus purely on traditional speech, in the same way that you wouldn't write about Standard Scottish English when writing about Scots.

Since North and East Riding dialect on the one hand and West Riding dialect on the other differ so much from eachother, it may be best to create separate pages for the two of them. At the very least this page needs a large rework but at least it's further along than most of the other pages broaching traditional dialects in England.

Thank you.

T

There's also variation, some speakers for one example may merge the vowel in "cooit" (coot) and "coit" you say Fendditokes (talk) 02:10, 14 April 2024 (UTC)

Yeah, adding citations would be great, thanks. Let me know what your research unearths.

So again, some of the trouble with you using slashes/strokes instead of square brackets is that we're getting into some level of detail/nuance/specifics here rather than keeping the transcription strictly phonemic. I approve of this! I think you and I are both very much on the same page about worries over creating a phonemic table. So, can I go ahead and make the change back to square brackets?

I'm not necessarily against your North-and-East Riding vs. West Riding split idea. However, you should certainly be ready with formal academic sources that affirm your split into those two topics as something more than arbitrary. Thanks! Wolfdog (talk) 13:14, 15 April 2024 (UTC)

thank you, I'm looking up my sources as I write this: go ahead with the square brackets but leave the actual phonological details to me.

As for the split across Yorkshire there's already a Wikipedia Article on the Humber-Lune which is the isogloss that splits the dialects of Yorkshire though it isn't the most detailed possible. Fendditokes (talk) 16:01, 15 April 2024 (UTC)