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)

"Examples of dialect" sections

@Fendditokes: Hi, let's discuss here any disagreements about eye-dialect spellings or modern IPA notation. The two "Examples of dialect" section were previously only very broadly cited. Now that I've used passages that (mostly) come from very specific sections, with exact page numbers provided, we can much more easily discuss how we want to update/modernize the notations. I hope that makes sense. This will make these sections also, in the future, much less vulnerable to the random notational preferences of any new editor. Both sections are both much more directly rooted now in Wright and Cowling. I hope that makes sense, and we can simply tweak my changes from here, moving forward. Wolfdog (talk) 01:06, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

In terms of the IPA, I would put some extra detail in as far as marking syllabic consonants as in say "drukken" for "drunk". For the Windhill section in particular I feel it's necessary to mark falling diphthongs to distinguish them from the vowel /ʊɪ/ which is a raising diphthong. In the Hackness section, pre-rhotic /t/ an /d/ are described by Cowling as stated to start with the aforementioned sounds and end in dental fricatives, thus changing [t̪] an [d̪] in the transcriptions to [t̪θ] and [d̪ð] would be more accurate. Fendditokes (talk) 19:44, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Also, the "Vocabulary comparison" section provides a clumsily long list. I don't know if you're interested in discussing that as well but I would love to pare that down to something a bit more digestible. Wolfdog (talk) 01:08, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

[Pasting from Wolfdog's talk page:]

just messaging about the ongoing edits, be very careful with lexical sets in Yorkshire dialects as the Standard ones hardly match up to dialectal distributions, not only that they're distributed differently between Windhill and Hackness. You have to go off more historical sets than the ones designed for standard English. For example the reason why there's a split between "work" as a noun and as a verb is because they have different etymologies. "Work" as a noun is effectively in the TERM set (merged with CAR) and as a verb is in NURSE (merged in Hackness with NORTH). Fendditokes (talk) 16:10, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

I used examples from the Swadesh list which were present in both grammars. How much of a reduction are we talking? Often vocabulary lists for minority languages related to the standard end up being reductively short so I'd like to avoid going that way. Fendditokes (talk) 19:50, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for all your points. I'm ok with the removal of the Wells lexical sets, per your arguments (though I think broadly the lexical sets still work). You can also change the [t̪] and [d̪] to [t̪θ] and [d̪ð] for Northern Yorkshire, if you wish. I'm happy with where the present list is at. It was previously quite the scroll to get through. Wolfdog (talk) 21:12, 21 June 2026 (UTC)

@Fendditokes: Hello again, let's get on the same page about some edits. Several of your most recent notation edits make perfect sense to me. But 1) I notice you provide a non-syllabic diacritic on some diphthongs but not others. Should we add those to all diphthongs? 2) Why should "hare" be removed if it's a homophone of "hair"? Homophones in Yorkshire dialect are not exactly intuitive to modern readers. 3) You and I continue to alter some of the eye-dialect spellings. Can we agree on one source for the spellings (for instance, strictly using the Wright and Cowling ones)? "Thou/thee/thy" for example I've seen spelled many different way in Yorkshire dialect literature. 4) Finally, is there any reason you removed the nouns forms of "work"? These seem like a particularly intriguing addition that readers would not otherwise intuit on their own. Thoughts? Thanks. Wolfdog (talk) 01:08, 22 June 2026 (UTC)