When is a door a 'dower' or a 'deer'? That depends whether you're in Bilsdale or Helmsley according to Paul, Eva and Doreen, three of the people we talked to for BBC Voices. Paul is a member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, he says that he can remember when within the space of three miles, people's accent varied wildly. "There's different dialects for different areas. There were different..er..pronunciations for words in Bilsdale for example...three mile up the road...for example we would call a door a 'deer'...they'd call it a 'dower'." We also spoke to Jim from Filey, he agreed that the way people pronounce words can change within a very small geographical area. | "the dialects, 'ow they change in a few miles." | | Jim from Filey |
"this is what you're speakin' about now, in't it...the dialects, 'ow they change in a few miles." So although we all come under the broad umbrella of 'Yorkshire', words can be pronounced completely differently within the space a few miles. But is this phenomonon of ultra-local accents and dialects dying out? Have the days gone when you could tell which village someone came from by their accent? | "Some dialectologists will talk about having a 5 mile rule" | | Dr Barrie Rhodes |
We spoke to Yorkshire dialect expert Barrie Rhodes, a retired doctor of Linguistics and active member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society. Dr Rhodes confirmed that areas only a few miles apart can produce identifiable differences in accent. "Some dialectologists will talk about having a 5 mile rule; it's just a rough rule of thumb where traditionally you could say that there was some noticeable change in vocabulary or pronunciation, normally classed as a dialect word." However Dr Rhodes also confimed what our survey of North Yorkshire discovered, that these ultra-local accents are steadily dying out. Dr Rhodes referred to this erosion as a process of 'levelling out', saying that 'less and less' can we identify people by the villages they were born in.
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