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Jonnie Robinson, Curator, English accents and dialects, British Library Sound Archive, writes:
Listen to the way Doreen pronounces the in the following statements: we lived in the house; next to the closet; I had to scrub this seat and the floor; whether it went into the pig-sty or not; another thing you did and all for the closet; you stuck hole in the middle; you hung it up at the back of the closet door; you had to look through the papers; then the candle would blow out; it had doors at the back of ours and the lads would be about. 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 that Yorkshire people say t'candle or t’floor or simply omit the definite article altogether. In fact, it's an extremely complex phonetic process, perhaps best understood as the combination of an unreleased and therefore inaudible <t> sound, produced simultaneously with a glottal stop (although even this is something of an over-simplification).
There are a number of features of Doreen's speech that are typical of broad dialect in the north-east of England: listen to the way she links the words in and onto followed by a word with an initial vowel by using a sound in the statements we lived in a farm cottage and that went, sort of, onto an ash-pit. She also uses a vowel sound in the word do that's characteristic of many speakers in the north-east in the phrases I got a three-penny bit for doing it and where it went I don't know. The words bairn and gan - both words of Germanic origin - are instantly recognisable north-eastern dialect words for 'child' and 'go' respectively. In addition Doreen uses a number of pronunciations that were once widespread in the area, but that are perhaps nowadays increasingly associated with older speakers in North Yorkshire and the north-east: listen above all to the way she pronounces the highlighted vowel sounds in seat, door, look, find and both.
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