Yorkshire (Leeds)

Oooh! a lady badger!

Katie, since you were treated to Chris Lakewood’s breakdown of a Leeds accent, I could (and probably should) leave it at that. However, I happen to have some resources of my own laying about, I’ll place them here.

PEOPLE

The traditional Yorkshire Dialect involves variations in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation that makes it nearly incomprehensible to a modern ear. [listen here]. The older pronunciations still exist even when most of the dialect words have been replaced with their Standard English synonyms, and  we might think of that as a broad or rural accent. You can get a taste of the broad accent as it occurs today in these videos:

My impulse is to shoot for a milder, more general form that definitely locates us in the North but that uses less distinctively broad characteristics. This is partially to avoid a caricatured accent that distracts from the story, but also because it makes for an accurate portrayal of how ordinary people would speak in England today, especially if they grew up in the North, but were now transplanted to the South.

POSTURE

Step one to finding the posture of this accent is to make a velarized /l/. If you follow this with the /ʊ/ sound of “look” you’ll have the main features. If you alternate this with an /a/ sound, you might notice that you’re making the mouth shapes you’d see from a Wallace and Grommet character. That’s a good place to start.

PROSODY

As you listen to the samples below, you’ll notice what might at first seem like rising pitch at the end of a phrase. Very often though, upon further listening, you may notice something more like a quick fall from a high pitch. These events do tend to happen predictably at the end of a phrase;

below are a series of recordings that emphasize the pitch pattern:

Now give a listen to a few more phrases:

PRONUNCIATION

Let’s focus on a handful of pronunciation targets rather than a comprehensive list of small adjustments.

STRUT    ʊ̞

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of this accent is that the vowel in words like strut, love, just, and nothing is realized with the lips more rounded, so that the words luck and look sound almost the same.

The actual target varies subtly, usually ending up in a more open position than /ʊ/. This is particularly true in the word one, which is pronounced to rhyme with gone.

TRAP = BATH    a

RP speakers make a distinction between the vowel in TRAP [æ] and the vowel in BATH [ɑː]. In US English we (generally) pronounce the vowels in both of these categories as [æ] In Yorkshire, speakers also merge these two categories, but they realize them as [a]. A more general accent might retain some distinction between them, landing closer to the RP model.

PRICE     ae̯

This diphthong a little bit “smoothed”, and so it can sound rather like the US Southern pronunciation. What makes this different is that the second element of the diphthong is still pronounced, but with the tongue cupped further down in the front, making the beginning and ending points of the diphthong quite close.

GOAT    o̞   

This one’s a little tricky. The traditional accent has a mid back rounded monophthong /o̞/, but in the sample below, you’ll hear two variations, a centralized monopthong, and a diphthong. For our purposes, establish the first, traditional version as a target, but then give yourself plenty of permission to drift towards other, more London-influenced realizations.

FACE     eː  

In a similar way, the FACE diphthong is traditionally a monophthong, but you’ll hear a little variation in this sample.

MOUTH

happY   ɛi ̯  

This is a delightful holdover from Early Modern English. The unstressed /i/ that occurs in words like “happy” and “city” is realized as a diphthong. Some speakers do it less than others, merging toward the RP realization of /ɪ/

LOT CLOTH   ɒ   

This vowel is realized very much as it would be in Southern England, with a back open rounded vowel: /ɒ/

THOUGHT       ɒ̜̙   

In London, this vowel is quite rounded. In the North, the rounding is less, but the tongue root tends to stay quite far back. This keeps it distinct from the usual California realization.

RHOTICITY          ∅   

Like most folks in England, Northerners don’t pronounce the phoneme /r/ when it comes after a vowel. These are the lexical set categories where we can hear this:

NURSE          NEAR          SQUARE          NORTH          FORCE          START             lettER

/nɞs/             /nɪː/          /skwɛː/        /nɑ̹ːθ/       /fɔːs/         /staːt/         /ˈlɛʔɜ/

NURSE       nɞs       

NEAR       nɪː        

SQUARE  skwɛː   

NORTH   nɑ̹ːθ

START     staːt

lettER      ˈlɛʔɜ

-ing                  

All but the most formal varieties of English manage to relax the “-ing” form of a verb towards an alveolar nasal /n/, and you’ll often seen this represented in dialect spelling: walkin’ and talkin’. In Yorkshire this is a perfectly acceptable pronunciation, and it is widely, though not universally used.

GLOTTALING

Like Cockney, Yorkshire accents ften rplace /t/ with a glottal stop /ʔ/ at the end of a syllable or between two vowels.