Learning the Yorkshire accent

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How can I learn too speak fluent in a Yorkshire accent?

Okay, so this is a 'necropost' par excellence, but god knows, this section of the forum is in desperate need of posts of any description.....

If you want to get a few pointers to the 'Yorkshire Accent', you could do a lot worse than to watch a few old episodes of the long-running UK soap opera Coronation Street from the 1970s and 1980s (quite a few of them on YouTube). Several of the characters have this accent, for example Alf Roberts, Ivy Tilsley and Vera Duckworth (also David Platt in more recent years). The show is set in Manchester, where Yorkshire accents are rarely heard, but the actors who played these characters were from Yorkshire, and spoke in their native accents.

I think the Yorkshire accent may have been taught in drama schools as some kind of generic, all-purpose accent for Northern England, though that is not the case in real life. I once watched several episodes of The Onedin Line, a 1970s BBC drama series set in Liverpool, and noticed that almost all the characters spoke in a Yorkshire-type accent, which is nothing like the real Liverpool ('Scouse') accent.

A very reliable test as to whether a person has a Yorkshire accent is to ask them to count to five. Four of the five numbers have a very distinctive sound, in particular 'one' and 'two'. The number 'one' is pronounced 'wun', for example. When the London actress Michelle Collins appeared in Coronation Street on a regular basis a few years ago, she always pronounced 'one' as 'wun': this would have appeared ridiculous to Mancunians, but people in most other parts of the country probably never even noticed.

https://coronationstreetupdates.blogspo ... dales.html

Hope this has been of interest.

To me, all UK accents sound the same. I guess my ears are not tuned enough to distinguish different accents. Most of them are hard to understand.

Maybe listen to Wally Batty off Last of the Summer Wine.

Just about as Yorkshire as you can get.

I looked up "Yorkshire Dialect" on Wikipedia and they have a couple of recordings of men speaking with a Yorkshire accent. I find all the explanations they have on pronouncing words really confusing.

Everyone knows a South Wales accent is the only way to go with accents. It should be an international law to have a South Wales accent.

As for learning a new accent, I have no idea and it seems tricky to make it second nature.

“Shud a mek sum tea, lass?”
“Aye, gerrit mashed an al sup it.”

“By… that worra grand cuppa tea.”
“It wor.”

…typical conversation in our house, although I’m not actually from Yorkshire, I usually speak reet posh.

^ Excellent.

Lurcher and ferret.

Answer the phone: "Ay up, ow's you?"

The accents in those 'Wally Batty' clips don't all sound to me to be pure 'Yorkshire', but then again they are actors and Yorkshire is the largest county in the UK, with lots of different variants in the way people speak.

A very typical Yorkshire vowel sound for me has always been evident in the way many folk pronounce words like 'two', 'you', 'few', etc. If you listen to the organ player in the blue top ('Renee Delafonte' LOL) in this clip just after the 11:16 mark, you may see what I mean. Her pronunciation of 'Lucille Hewitt' is priceless. Notice also the way she drops the initial 'H' - lots of UK working class regional accents do this.