How Yorkshire and Lancashire accents differ - and why that should be celebrated: Yorkshire Post Letters

I THINK that many of the differences in accents between industrial Lancashire and Yorkshire stem from the former’s noisy cotton industry, where lip reading was the means of communication and many of the weavers were stone deaf anyway, including two of my aunts.

The need for facial expression meant emphasis of the open mouthed short ‘a’, the grinning short ‘e’ and the pursed deep ‘u’’ and the disappearance of the facially useless ‘h’.

When I came to Yorkshire over 50 years ago, I was proud to say ‘a cum frum Manchister in Lancishire’. However I soon realised that my emphases made me sound harsh or even angry. At the end of the first day I said ‘am go-ing 0wm’ the response was ‘Waa, wat’s up’. I learnt that ‘arm gorn orm’ got the satisfactory ‘reet, si thi then’. It is a shame that mass media will even out these differences, though immigration may introduce new ones, but more unfortunate is the loss of the words themselves, starting with thee and thou (in south Yorkshire ‘thi and tha’) which were originally the correct usage, since beaten out by well meaning didacts.

I hope you will continue to support the efforts of those who are attempting to identify and even re-introduce them.

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