All About the Yorkshire Accent

I thought I'd write a little blog post about the Yorkshire/Sheffield accent. Since I can't mimic it for you all — I'm hopeless at that — I'll give you some videos to watch and also I'll try to describe it. To start things of in an entertaining manner, here's a Monty Python sketch called "The Four Yorkshiremen." To truly get this sketch you have to realize there's a stereotype (that's pretty accurate) that the farther north in England you get, the poorer people get. The South is known as being very "posh." The North is seen as blue-collar, poor, heavy drinking, and generally not very classy. Anyway, enjoy the video! It's pretty hilarious:

They try to mimic the Yorkshire accent. Pay attention to how they drop their the's. For example, at 1:03, Cleese says "with great holes in t' roof." This "dropping" of the is not actually as simple as leaving it out, however. The British library has this to say about it: "Definite article reduction — an abbreviated form of the word ‘the’ — is a distinctive feature of speech throughout Yorkshire and some neighbouring counties. This is often inaccurately represented by mimics who imply people here say t’police or simply omit the definite article altogether. In fact, it’s an extremely complex phonetic process." For more on this, visit the British Library's webpage on regional British accents.

Next, I have a video I made for you all. I don't know how interesting it'll actually be for you, but I find it totally entertaining. Last night I went to a pub quiz at The Fox and Duck. The pub quiz is a favorite past time of the British wherein you're asked a series of questions and whatever table gets the most right answers wins some sort of alcohol. Questions can be on anything, but usually they're pretty UK-centric, which makes it hard for internationals to win. Additionally, it's set up like family feud, where you get more points for guessing the most popular answer. So we were a table of Germans and one American trying to figure out what British people would think. It was entertaining.

Anyway, there was a group of older men who were obviously local sheffield blokes sitting at the table near us. They were having a drunken good time, and their accent was a perfect example of what I've been trying to describe to some of you. So I decided to be mildly creepy and try to record them using my camera's video function. I ended up with about 15 minutes or so of video to sort through, and I tried to edit it down to only the most entertaining clips. I added little notes throughout so you'd know what's going on, and so that you wouldn't die of boredom after staring at a video of a wall for 6 minutes. The video starts out with a quick shot of the pub we were in, and then you'll hear the accent. (You'll also hear my German friends and I strategizing about our answers.) The best examples of the accent are towards the end, when answers were being read, as the guys got kind of upset about not getting a few of them right. I hope this is mildly interesting... not really sure if it will be. It entertains me, at least!


Good work if you made it all the way through. You got to hear the hilarious "BABIES???" comment. :D

So there you go. Hope you're all doing well!

Almost forgot: here's a short video of Sheffield city centre decorated for Christmas: