Can you understand Yorkshire dialect? Inside the mission to save the county’s ‘beautiful’ language
High up on the top floor of the magnificently Victorian Keighley Library, an 80-year-old man is speaking animatedly to a group of about 20 people in what appears to be an incomprehensible foreign language. “‘Goa wesh them hands afore tha touches owt t’eyt’, shoo commanded. ‘That mud ha’ been up t’chimley ivver sin t’school lowsed. An’ put wood in t’oile. Haw money times hev Ah telled thi abaht thi manner? Frame thissen, an’ doan’t let me ha’ to tell tha aegean, er tha goals to bed baht teea, soa tha knaws’.” *
In fact, Rod Dimbleby is reading a story called ‘Some Gooid Luck fer t’Higginbottoms’ (Some Good Luck for the Higginbottoms) at the inaugural session of of Let’s Talk Tyke, a six-week course in Yorkshire dialect (as Tyke is officially known) being run here in Keighley, in Yorkshire’s historic West Riding.
Half an hour in and I’ve already learnt more about broad Yorkshire than I thought I’d know in a lifetime: that the Yorkshire dialect is among the oldest languages spoken in Britain, dating in some original forms to the 5th century; that it was once spoken by millions of people; that much of it has German origins, although some words sound almost Scottish in the way they’re pronounced; that Yorkshire dialect varies hugely given the size of the county and its three distinct dialect areas – the West Riding, East Riding and Cleveland in the north; that the Yorkshire Dialect Society is the oldest dialect society in the world, dating to 1867, and that I am easily both the least Yorkshire-sounding person in the room and the youngest by quite some margin.
Even Keith, a fellow “off-come-den” (or person from outside Yorkshire) sounds more northern than I do; the majority of my classmates are West Riding born and bred, and many of them grew up speaking or hearing dialect at home, hence wanting to learn more about it and prevent it from dying out.
There are no hard numbers on how many people use Yorkshire dialect – and it’s even harder to know how many people can truly understand it in its broadest form. Yorkshire, as a county, is enormous; in the UK, it’s second only to the Highlands in size, and the population sits at around 5.5 million. So while it’s not its own language, such as Welsh, nurturing its idiosyncrasies and keeping its roots alive is clearly in the interest of many.
I grew up in Yorkshire (although I wasn’t born here) and recently moved back north. Going on a dialect course would, I thought, be a great way to reconnect with the land of my childhood, learn something new and, at the very least, have a laugh. What I was not expecting was to learn quite so much, or enjoy it quite so thoroughly. Six weeks on from that first session, I have made a new set of friends, had a stab at writing my own Yorkshire poetry and am a member of a WhatsApp group conducted entirely in dialect (sample message: ‘Rod wer on t’bbc radio 4 jus’ b’fooar 9am I wur reet gobsmacked to eer im.’).
Rod himself seems somewhat bemused by the attention his course has garnered: as well as Radio 4 he – or rather, we – have been featured in multiple national broadsheets and have been given several slots on TV.
“It’s all been quite a shock,” says Rod. “I was hoping to get a handful [of students], maybe 10 if I were lucky.” In the end, he had to start a waiting list, leaving those of us who signed up early (paying our ￡5 a week for two hours of teaching, including coffee and a biscuit) feeling pretty smug.
Rod, a retired German teacher, has made it his mission in life to promote the Yorkshire language – he is chairman of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, and has written several books in and on the subject of dialect. He also travels the county telling stories in dialect, which is, he says, “part of our heritage; it’s the language of folk”.
As such, it would be a tragedy were it to disappear, although judging by the success of the course, that now seems far from likely.
We hardcore course regulars are a disparate bunch, counting among our number a retired policeman, a former PE teacher, a retired counsellor and an ex-electrician.
Everyone brings something different to the course: Peter is our resident joker, always clad resplendently in a flat cap and bright yellow T-shirt with a map of Britain on it that has Yorkshire marked as “right” and the rest of the country as “wrong”; Frank is the poet, writing (as ‘Cobblestone Jack’) the most moving verses in dialect but also quick with the dry wit and Yorkshire jokes (a Yorkshireman, he declares, is a Scotsman with the generosity kicked out of him); Elizabeth, the daughter of a “gurt big farming family” with nine children is a superlative scone-maker; Keith, my fellow off-come-den, loves language and linguistics and is also a fan of Yorkshire dialect rap; Pam, diminutive and dainty, always gets the best marks in all our dialect tests and Stephen’s wry self-deprecation at his own shortcomings in dialect translation makes me feel much better about my own struggles. An occasional attendee is Tyler, a mere stripling of 25 who is an independent councillor and a fiercely proud member of the Yorkshire Devolution Society.
Everyone’s here for a different reason, but the common thread is a deep and abiding love for God’s own county. “The place is in my blood,” says Peter. “I will do anything to promote and improve my county.”
Joanna adds: “I am a ‘Yorksher Lass’ through and through, and ‘reight proud on it. I love the Yorkshire language – it makes me feel that I am home.”
“I assimilated quite a bit of dialect from hearing my great uncle’s conversations as a child,” adds Jane, “although when he once said, ‘Ow lass, fotch t’ besom” I wasn’t sure what he was expecting me to bring to him.” (A brush it turned out.)
“It was when I was at college down south and baffled my lecturers by asking for extra time to hand in my lab work because I’d ‘made a right pig’s ear of it’ that I realised we have a whole different way with words in Yorkshire.”
Indeed. But whatever our reasons for being there, we quickly form a merry band, and every Friday morning sees cheerful greetings of “Ey up!”, “Sithee” and “Nah then!” as we take our seats (a pattern that quickly becomes rigidly set in stone).
Rod puts us through our paces, teaching dialect much as he might have once taught German, and what I thought would be a gentle look at some odd words becomes a rigorous course in the etymology of dialect in all its variety.
For example, we learn that Hs, even if written, are never pronounced; that “oile” is a catch-all word for “place” and that Yorkshire’s Germanic roots means that in dialect, words are never usually more than two syllables long (a three or more syllable word generally has a southern, or Norman French root). We read out loud in dialect, and translate dialect to standard English and back again – the latter much harder than the former (I have an English degree but do shamefully badly in the translation exercises).
Part of the reason, perhaps, that Yorkshire dialect remains not officially recognised in the manner of, say, Cornish, is that it is so varied: while there are standard words and phrases for some things, it has evolved over time, and a word used for, example, “lake” in one part of the county could have 12 different iterations across the whole of Yorkshire. Another might be the tendency, even among Yorkshire folk, to look down on dialect.
”Growing up it was drummed out of us”, says Joanna; “we had to ‘speak properly’ – Queen’s English.”
“The education/indoctrination system knocked it out of me,” agrees Frank.
When he first “began living it up in the bright lights of Keighley” in his early teens, he says he lost a great deal of his natural speech. “You could tell I was from Yorkshire, but not pinpoint exactly where from within a 20-mile radius,” he says. Now 70, he’s determined to pass on dialect in all its rich variants to his 21-month-old granddaughter.
And it’s worth passing on. Far from being just comedy speech (although much of the writing is very funny), dialect, once you start to get an ear for it, is both beautiful and expressive. One of my favourite weeks is when, after learning a bit of vocab – “sammed” means “picked” (as in an apple); an owl is a “hullet” and an oatcake a “bannick” (more Scottish overlap) – we listen to Rod and another dialect aficionado, Colin Speakman, read us poetry.
The verses, from poems written largely in the 1800s, are moving and incredibly intimate – social commentary written by men and women in their own working class language, on the sadness of never being able to afford to marry; on burying a child; on seeing children go hungry. It is tender-hearted and beautiful – and somehow even more so when you know it has been written by a big burly man working down t’mill.
Writing it ourselves is a different matter. Perhaps the biggest champion and protector of dialect in recent times was Arnold Kellett, a former mayor of Knaresborough and head of modern languages who published The Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore in the 1990s and was also head of the Yorkshire Dialect Society (he was also the author of my new favourite book, Ee by Gum, Lord! – the gospels in dialect).
But even with Kellett’s dictionary to hand, you’ve still got to decide whether to use “an”, “n” or “en” for “and”. I am full of admiration for my classmates, from whom the most beautiful poetry and prose pours forth.
But, though I might not be writing it yet, my dialect’s coming along nicely. The other day I started to tell my children to “put wood in t’oile” when I wanted them to shut the door, before realising they probably wouldn’t understand me. I’d better start teaching them too. As Rod says: “People have been talking about dialect dying for years – but it hasn’t yet.” ‘Appen e’s reight.
* Translation of extract from Some Gooid Luck fer t’Higginbottoms: “Go and wash your hands before you touch anything,” she commanded. “You must have been up the chimney ever since school finished. And shut the door! How many times have I told you about your manners? Sort yourself out, and don’t let me have to tell you again, or else you know you’ll go to bed without any supper.”