Dun't talk rammel*
We tend to think that our American cousins only really know about "Queen's" / standard / BBC English (otherwise known as Received Pronunciation) or the kind of cheerful parody of Cockney as hopelessly mangled by Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Yet, even painted with the broadest brush, there's RP (Received Pronunciation), London "Cockney", West Country (always adopted by lazy actors in England who are portraying rural types), West Midlands "Brummie", Yorkshire/Lancashire (can be confused by the untrained ear), Liverpool "Scouse" and Tyneside "Geordie." Truth is, accents change over even small distances and living, as I did, halfway between the city of Sheffield and the town of Barnsley (urban centres less than twenty miles from one another) exposed me to two different Yorkshire accents.
Some expressions below use dialect words. I'm also trying to render accented pronunciation and so my spelling tries to phonetically imitate that pronunciation. As I have no grasp of the International Phonetic Alphabet, this might cause some confusion, but you'll probably be able to pick the bones out of it all.
Sheffield accents tend to flatten vowels, while Barnsley accents can use vowels to their fullest value (squeezing the full value out of anything is definitely a Yorkshire trait!). "Going down the road" would render (approximately) as "gooin' daahn' roo-ad" in Sheffield. It could be heard similarly in Barnsley but might also be rendered as "goin' daown' rhode." The definite article would be omitted in both cases, replaced with the hint of a glottal stop. People from the south of England, when mimicking northern accents, often incorrectly imagine that "the" is always replaced in these instances with "t' " (eg gooin' daahn t'roo-ad"). Well, sometimes it is, but mostly it's not. A Sheffield person would say "I am going to the cinema/movies" as "Am gooin'ter' pictures."
At the beginning of Monty Python's "Spanish Inquisition" sketch, Graham Chapman manages an exaggerated, parody northern accent, but at least he doesn't fall into the "t' " trap (though he doesn't quite manage the almost-glottal-stop either). Alas, much worse solecisms are to be found in their setting a caption of "Jarrow"—a town in Tyneside—and then having Chapman's "worker" speak in a mock Lancashire/Yorkshire accent instead of the more appropriate "Geordie" accent. Also, textile mill work would, again, be normally associated with Lancashire, while coal mining and shipbuilding would be more normally associated with Jarrow/Tyneside. Whether that came about through deliberate absurdist comedy, through upper middle class, Oxbridge graduates neither knowing nor caring about working-class matters, or through their parodying of non-northerners generally clumping their conception all northerners together, one must determine for oneself!
Having said that, Michael Palin's father would have been exposed to Yorkshire accents every day, working at one time in the management at Newton Chambers' engineering company near High Green (aside from military tanks, industrial boilers etc, NC Ltd was also famous for making "Izal" branded toilet paper, a product almost entirely unsuitable for its purpose due to its hardness, smoothness and complete lack of absorbency, being far more akin to tracing paper than bathroom tissue. Often supplied to schools, public sector and other industrial places of work, it discouraged "comfort breaks" for generations. No wonder Brits are anally retentive).
You might have noticed that a monosyllabic word, like "road" above, might gain an extra syllable in Sheffield. "Boots" for example, becomes "booits" and "shoes" becomes "shoyz." Coal becomes "coil" and hole becomes "'oil," so the shed or outhouse where solid fuel is kept is the "coiloil" (coal hole). An instruction to close a domestic door becomes "put' wud in' 'oil" (put the wood in the hole).
The vowel-flattening can be observed in the pronunciation of "right" as "reight." Being "reight chuffed" is to be "right pleased" as to be chuffed is to be happy or contented (to say dis-chuffed for the opposite is a very modern coinage. I think unrelatedly, "chuff" is also 1) a synonym for a boor, and 2) a dialect synonym for arse). Words like "making" would be similarly flattened to "mekkin'" (eg "Tha mekkin' a mess." The phrase "tha meks a better door n'or a win-der" lets someone know that they are obstructing somebody's view ("you make a better door than a window").
Another dialect word is "capped," meaning to be surprised or stunned as the finishing touch (as in "to cap it all"). "Tha'll be capped wi' thissen" means "you will be capped with yourself" or "you will be stunned (by the forthcoming consequences)" while "ah wo' capped" translates as "I was stunned". The colloquial use of "thee," "thy" and "thou" persisted strongly in the north of England and, though in decline, some folks (pronounced "fooerks") happily still use these terms, as in:
"What tha' doin'?" |
Respectively:
What are you doing? |
(1) "Monk" is cited by some as an abbreviation of "monkey".
Slight diversion: Right/reight, as used above has a similar meaning to "quite," as in fully affirming the succeeding concept (eg "reight chuffed"). Nationally, Brits have an additional use of "quite" as a weak or unenthusiastic affirmation: to say one quite likes something can actually indicate a fairly tepid positive response, or even an active disapproval masked by politeness. I'm led to believe that this secondary use isn't the practice in the USA, and that Brits can accidentally misdirect American citizens by using the term this way. No idea whether that's true or not. ['Tis true. –DKS]
Some verbs are used in a slightly unfamiliar vein: "Frame/shape thi'sen" means "pull yourself together," or "try harder." "Stop" might be used where "stay" might be more expected: "A' tha' gooin' aht?" (are you going out?) "Nay, 'am stoppin' in" (no, I'm staying in). For putting away the crockery after washing up one might refer to "sidin' [the] pots" as in setting them aside. A large clearance of anything, from the removal of household junk to mass redundancies, might be a "sidation". Throng, usually describing bustle or a bustling crowd, denotes any intense activity, even of an individual: "A'd gotten throng fettlin' me car" (I'd become busy cleaning [or maintaining] my car [in Sheffield, "fettling" was most usually applied to the cleaning and finishing of metal castings, removing flash and so on]). "Mashin'" is the making of tea: "a' tha' mashin'?" (are you making a brew/a pot of tea). Other verbs are probably original coinings: playing, in South Yorkshire, is often called laking: "is your Gaz comin' aht lakin'?" (is your Gary coming out to play?) "What does tha' think tha' lakin' at?" (what do you think you're playing at?). Gossip is referred to as clackin' or callin' (pronounced cal-in' but fairly obviously derived from "calling").
Here's a selection of other expressions: "spice" is the local word for sweets/candy; "champion" is used to describe excellence ("that Yorkshire puddin' were champion"); "nowt" is nothing (as in "naught"); "bah't" (or, more accurately "bar't") means without (bar [the]); "allus" is abbreviated from "always" and "ne'er" from "never"; "wain't" is "will not" ("she wain't tell me nowt" [she won't tell me nothing] employing a double negative) and "mun't" is "must not" ("tha' mun't let 'im get top 'and o' thee [you mustn't let him get the upper hand of you]); to be "stalled" is to be tired, weary, exhausted or otherwise phased or stopped ("'am stalled on 'earin' all thee lyin'" [I'm tired of hearing all your lying]); to be "tane up" is to be excited or interested (a corruption of "taken up": "our lad were reight tane up wi' yonder lass" [our son was very taken up with the girl over there]); "shite" is an obvious synonym for shit; a tyke is obviously a small dog, but it's also a common reference to a Yorkshireman; a bairn is a small child; to be "clemmed" or "clammin'" is to be very hungry; and finally—one my grandmother used often and which I found very amusing as a child—to "cronk" is to sit down.
I came across a quotation from an interview with the actor Dai (David) Bradley, who played Billy Casper in Kes. He was recruited directly from school by director Ken Loach (together with other children from film's location area) as the director wanted authenticity and naturalism in his young performers. He won the BAFTA award that year for Outstanding Newcomer. Bradley later recalled:
"...Most importantly, we both [the character Billy Casper and the actor himself] had the same accent. It would have been very difficult, say, coming from Sheffield and trying to do a Barnsley accent. You couldn't say 'dee' and 'dah'. Dee-dahs: it just wouldn't have worked!" |
"Dee and Dah" refers to the Sheffield pronunciation of "thee" and "thou" that might (in those deeply set in their dialect and accent) render "th" as "d" (giving a possible "da dun't du dat, duz da?" for "you don't do that, do you?").
I wonder what an outsider would make of a Yorkshire person saying "tintintin" (something they might say if an object they were looking for in a metal container wasn't therein): "'t'in't in' tin" = "it isn't in the tin".
The phrase "thee-in' and tha-in'" (thee-ing and thou-ing) is a local reference to the use of strong Yorkshire dialect in speech, usually in a negative context. A mother who wanted her children to speak English in a more nationally acceptable/polite/posh manner (probably to ease or facilitate social, commercial or professional advancement) might pull them up on their use of dialect by saying "stop thee-in' and tha-in'".
By the way, a traditional Yorkshire/northern expression of surprise is "well! I'll go the foot of our stairs"—I have no idea why. It's usually pronounced as "weh! Algutterfutteraah stairs".
I think that's more than enough. How much of this rammel can anybody stand? "Rammel" is rubbish or trash (and might be connected to the same term referring to shale layers sitting just above a seam of coal).
*Dun't talk rammel = Don't talk rubbish.