When I was a child, my grandfather taught me a tongue-twister which was the mark of a “true Sheffielder”: “’As tha bin to t’ Wicker wheer t’ watter runs o’er t’ weir”. The test, he said, was to be able to recite it, at speed, intelligibly. Before starting my research on the tongue-twister, I “googled” the phrase and consulted friends and family on their recollection of it. It appears the phrase is well-known and well-loved by Sheffielders – I found references to it on several websites and forums and in various forms, with slight variations – for instance dahn (down) instead of o’er.  

The phrase exhibits several traditional Yorkshire dialect features. Kellett (1991) notes that the use of tha as the singular form of you relates back to the thou of earlier English, retained from the Anglo-Saxon. Beal (2006) refers to the term “thee-ing and tha-ing” (p23) which was used in Sheffield to mean the use of broad dialect.

The reduction of  the to t’ (as in t’ Wicker etc) is a phenomenon known as Definite Article Reduction (DAR). Hughes et al (2005) state that this is “extremely common in Yorkshire dialects, to the point that it is a…well known and stereotyped feature of these varieties” (p97). Jones (2002) emphasises that the northern DAR is unique in that “no other region of the English speaking world possesses this identifying characteristic” (p327). The assumption is that DAR originated in the Middle English /íe/ which assimilated to a /te/ sound. From this, it’s assumed that further changes, such as vowel elision, resulted in the various forms of modern dialect DAR (Jones, 2002, pp325-326). Jones also suggests that the evolution of DAR may have had roots in the “general loss of final unstressed vowels which affected northern dialects of English from around the eleventh century onwards” (p330). The first textual representation of DAR was in A Yorkshire Dialogue in 1673 – since which time it has been found heavily in dialect literature, for example Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. (See Kellett (1991) for further examples.) Although in dialect literature DAR is usually represented in the simple form of t’, Jones recorded sixteen different variations in DAR production. And whilst DAR comes natural to northerners, and Yorkshire folk in particular, Kellett (1991) notes that the DAR, which he calls a “glottal stop”, is “…very difficult for standard English speakers to imitate” (p28). From personal experience, he relates a tale of a London actor taking the part of a Yorkshireman. The actor struggled to pronounce such phrases as in t’ cave – his attempts rendered first an imitated glottal stop: “in…cave”, and then a “compromise” of “int cave”, which sounded like “inter cave” (p28).

The Yorkshire dialect has a strong tendency towards idiosyncratic pronunciation. In the tongue-twister, this is highly evident – ‘as for has and bin for been, and, possibly the most obvious, watter for water. This pronunciation is suggested to date back to the Old English /w@ter/. Leith (2007) references this pronunciation, noting that “in southern English pronunciation water rhymes with caught a, whereas…in northern dialects it rhymes with matter” (pp54-55). He explains that the /w/ influences the rounding of /a/ in southern English but the north retained what he suggests was the original pronunciation (p55). An alternative explanation is put forward by Rhodes and LeFevre (1998) that the Yorkshire pronunciation arose for the Norman word for water: vatre. Kellett (1991), however, points out that in Yorkshire pronunciation, /a/ “is usually short, even in words where there is a longer ‘a’ in standard English”. He uses the example of fatther, where an extra /t/ is added to indicate the shortened vowel.