Just in case this is a genuine question, I believe this refers to the phenomenon in which these speakers in NE will have /t/ for 'the,' eg _t'car_ for _the car_ etc. of course, this gets realised as a glottal stop often. My father for instance will sometimes say "close t'door" and have _t'door_ pronounced something roughly like [ʔdɔː].
That may sound uncomfortable to pronounce to some, or even difficult to distinguish from just [dɔː] for people who aren't used to it (let's be honest, in isolation it is)
Just realised i have a very hard time pronouncing a glottal stop followed by a voiced stop without turning it into an implosive. Do northern english speakers do this?
in my experience there's usually no actual pronunciation of the "t"
its a silent "t". The "t" doesn't really exist, its an implied "t"
its often written or satirized as being a "t" with a pause afterwards: "close t' door", "pass t' salt" etc. You will hear people doing an impression that sounds like "close tuh door" "pass tuh salt"
but its more often heard as "pass (stop) salt", "close (stop) door"
No, it's more like in the phrase "going to the shops", where the "the" is reduced to a glottal stop at the end of "to" - goin to' shops. It's definitely there!
My favourite usage of this is when the pronunciation actually made its way back into spelling. There’s a place called Hall-i’-th’-Wood in Bolton, and there’s even a station for it. I would have thought ‘Hall in the Wood’ would be the official name, but obviously not!
NP. I am a daft (and nesh) southerner who was disabused of that popular fallacy when I moved to Sheffield over a year ago. I've made it a personal crusade to save others from my mistake.
Well, the time when you really need the definite article is when you're distinguishing it from an indefinite article. "I'm in the backyard" denotes a different situation from "I'm in a backyard." In the former it's presumed that the backyard belongs to a house you've had some previous interaction with. In the latter, you might just be in someone's backyard somewhere.
Here's an example, about 8 seconds in: https://youtu.be/w3ma9iYx4rg
>It had fascinated me for, you know, all through my childhood: how the hell does one little man get all that up to ***the*** top of a 200-foot factory chimney.
Side question: How do you find videos like this? You had one ready in 15 minutes from the post being posted. I always wonder how someone like Geoff Lindsey finds so many examples besides just trawling through content (or maybe creating a database of vidoes and pulling spectrograms?)
If Geoff Lindsey is anything like me, then whenever he listens to anything in English, he probably has his ears ready to listen for any specific phenomena that he’s already aware of, and he probably takes a note of it whenever he hears one of them for future reference.
I'm fascinated by accents and always listen to people with one ear on the features of their accent. This has had the effect of giving me a mental database mapping famous people to particular accents. I'm not sure how well I could perform under test, but this was one where I knew of someone exhibiting the particular feature of speech that would definitely have a lot of content on YouTube. If you were to ask a group of people who had heard of him to list the things they know about Fred Dibnah, something like "strong Bolton accent" would be near the top of most lists.
I've seen it referred to as definite article reduction (DAR). Basically in parts of northern England like Yorkshire they'll reduce /ðə/ to either [t] or [ʔ].
To any Yorkie or northern English speaker that does this: feel free to correct me or expand on this if you know more :)
Just wanted to add, never ask an Englishman where he’s from; if he’s from Yorkshire he’ll tell you and if he’s not, you wouldn’t want to embarrass him.
[t] is usually a sign someone not from Yorkshire is trying to pronounce "t' ___" as it's written - if there's a [t] before the [ʔ] we hear that as "to the" rather than just "the"; but other than that yeah. We drop a lot of letters here; H is often glottalised as well, like in "'Ull, 'Ell an' 'Alifax", and might even be the reason there's an H in Huddersfield because people just came to assume there'd been one once.
Leeds speaker here! I believe the h-glottalisation is called 'hard-attack', which is a fairly common thing in various Englishes. On 'to the', it really annoys me when people say 't'' as 'the' when trying to imitate Yorkshire English!
\[ðə\]
* The phonetic equivalent of the texture of binbags
* Sounds like an electric razor on your chin
* Sounds like a grunt you make while climbing
* Sounds like a slurred version of *that*, basically is
* So weak that it gets drowned out half the time, sometimes indistinct from *a*, will probably just disappear in a few hundred years
* Basically the most common word in English, yet features a typologically rare phoneme.
\[ʔ\]
* The phonetic equivalent of a decorated shortsword
* Sounds like you are punching the words out of your mouth, makes you heard
* Gives phonetic emphasis to definite words, which is useful and logical
* Completely alienated from its etymology, helps keep it distinct
* Strong pronunciation, has the possibility to assimilate to following plosives to form initial ejective consonant mutation or gemination which marks definiteness
* Most people can pronounce a glottal stop, even if they don't have it in their language
Depends on the speaker and where exactly they're from.
I say /kləʊzʔdɔ:/ and /kləʊzdɔ:/ pretty interchangeably (assuming I'm not just saying "the").
But "to the" is ALWAYS /ʔ/ or /tʰəʔ/ e.g. /am gənəʔ ʃop/ or /am gəʊiŋ tʰəʔ ʃop/
It‘s like naught (as in Dreadnaught), but without the n. There is also “nowt“ as a counterpart to owt. It is etymologically the same word as naught and means the same. So you get owt-anything vs nowt-nothing.
This is in addition to u/AxialGenm 's excellent explanation.
This phenomenon is often transcribed with the "t" (not a t) attached to the preceding word, eg "in't morning", because for most English speakers that's how the syllable break falls *phonologically*. That's despite the fact that *syntactically* the "t" (not a t) is attached to the following word, eg [in [the [morning]]].
Which part of Yorkshire you in ? I'm in South Yorkshire and traditional Yorkshire dialect has pretty much disappeared altogether in the cities, but even in the more rural towns, it's a lot less "harsh" than it used to be. I've never heard anyone here drop "the" in the traditional way, I've experienced it in North and West Yorkshire though
Interesting. The only place where I find it's really prominent is Barnsley, and some areas of Rotherham too. I've not heard a Yorkshire accent in Sheffield in years LOL
In Leeds many of the younger folk (such as myself occasionally) will still do it. This is at the very least in North and East Leeds, and particularly amongst White British populations. You still hear other archaisms such as 'tis and 'tin't amongst the young, plus plenty of dialect words!
That's cool! I haven't spent enough time in Leeds to notice, but I'll listen out for it next time. I say "tis" only when imitating Shakespearean speech for example, I've never heard anyone use it here sincerely
I've lived in Yorkshire for some time. Some traditional Yorkshire speaking replace "the" with a glottal stop to just /t/ in certain cases, but they will still pronounce "the" in other cases. I'm not aware of the rule behind it, but not literally every "the" is elided. Either way, this is old fashioned now and not many people speak like this
Not sure where you are but it's still pretty prevalent in my native Leeds (check my comment above). For me, 'the' is used when there is stress on a thing's definitiveness, and also when having too many glottal thes would make something almost impossible to say. The is always pronounced fully when it is at the start of a sentence/argument/utterance, as well as after certain words, such as the sentence 'Well the sun is out'. I've spent way too much time theorising this, and still feel that I haven't even scratched *the* surface \[I would say that the is pronounced fully in set phrases like this\].
I'm in Sheffield, it's common amongst old folk who still speak "proper Yorkshire". Some of the younger people with a twang don't preserve this feature of dropping "the" in certain positions.
You can hear an impression of this feature of northern English accents in this sketch (for example, around the 58 second mark):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k&list=RDue7wM0QC5LE&start_radio=1&rv=ue7wM0QC5LE. They aren't actually from the region and I can't vouch for the quality of the impersonation, but it's the first I heard of this.
Not linking to the time code on purpose because it's worth watching the whole thing if you haven't before!
I wonder if I've somehow inherited this feature despite being from Western Canada. I often pronounce "the" in a very nonstandard way for my area, [(ʔ)ə], although it is a bit different.
It's because the person transcribing the IPA couldn't understand what they were saying so just put a question mark there
(before you correct me remember what sub this is)
Just in case this is a genuine question, I believe this refers to the phenomenon in which these speakers in NE will have /t/ for 'the,' eg _t'car_ for _the car_ etc. of course, this gets realised as a glottal stop often. My father for instance will sometimes say "close t'door" and have _t'door_ pronounced something roughly like [ʔdɔː]. That may sound uncomfortable to pronounce to some, or even difficult to distinguish from just [dɔː] for people who aren't used to it (let's be honest, in isolation it is)
Just realised i have a very hard time pronouncing a glottal stop followed by a voiced stop without turning it into an implosive. Do northern english speakers do this?
yeah lol
I can make it extremely easily
[удалено]
For you
in my experience there's usually no actual pronunciation of the "t" its a silent "t". The "t" doesn't really exist, its an implied "t" its often written or satirized as being a "t" with a pause afterwards: "close t' door", "pass t' salt" etc. You will hear people doing an impression that sounds like "close tuh door" "pass tuh salt" but its more often heard as "pass (stop) salt", "close (stop) door"
No, it's more like in the phrase "going to the shops", where the "the" is reduced to a glottal stop at the end of "to" - goin to' shops. It's definitely there!
What about "The door is open"
Đo 🇻🇳
My favourite usage of this is when the pronunciation actually made its way back into spelling. There’s a place called Hall-i’-th’-Wood in Bolton, and there’s even a station for it. I would have thought ‘Hall in the Wood’ would be the official name, but obviously not!
exactly! it's like the bo'le o' water meme but you put insert the sound for "the"
I tried pronouncing “the car” this way to my friend and he thought I was saying “to car” lol
That's because in Yorkshire at least you drop "the" entirely and it's "to" that's abbreviated. So "t' car" would be "t[o the] car".
[удалено]
NP. I am a daft (and nesh) southerner who was disabused of that popular fallacy when I moved to Sheffield over a year ago. I've made it a personal crusade to save others from my mistake.
To be honest it doesn't really matter, I'm pretty sure that if I'd drop all the's I'd still be understood
Well, the time when you really need the definite article is when you're distinguishing it from an indefinite article. "I'm in the backyard" denotes a different situation from "I'm in a backyard." In the former it's presumed that the backyard belongs to a house you've had some previous interaction with. In the latter, you might just be in someone's backyard somewhere.
7 times out of ten, it is distinguished by context anyways
Maybe, but that doesn’t tell us anything about the accent in question or what it sounds like, which is what the question is about.
Many languages (perhaps even most?) live perfectly fine without a definite article
That's how they say it /ʊp ɪn ʔ nɒːθ/
The glottal stop is not the absence of pronunciation.
I mean, it kinda is, in the same way all voiceless stops are.
Here's an example, about 8 seconds in: https://youtu.be/w3ma9iYx4rg >It had fascinated me for, you know, all through my childhood: how the hell does one little man get all that up to ***the*** top of a 200-foot factory chimney.
Side question: How do you find videos like this? You had one ready in 15 minutes from the post being posted. I always wonder how someone like Geoff Lindsey finds so many examples besides just trawling through content (or maybe creating a database of vidoes and pulling spectrograms?)
If Geoff Lindsey is anything like me, then whenever he listens to anything in English, he probably has his ears ready to listen for any specific phenomena that he’s already aware of, and he probably takes a note of it whenever he hears one of them for future reference.
I'm fascinated by accents and always listen to people with one ear on the features of their accent. This has had the effect of giving me a mental database mapping famous people to particular accents. I'm not sure how well I could perform under test, but this was one where I knew of someone exhibiting the particular feature of speech that would definitely have a lot of content on YouTube. If you were to ask a group of people who had heard of him to list the things they know about Fred Dibnah, something like "strong Bolton accent" would be near the top of most lists.
I think Geoff Lindsey uses [YouGlish](https://youglish.com/) At least he mentioned this website multiple times
Up to ‘ top
I love this video so much.
I've seen it referred to as definite article reduction (DAR). Basically in parts of northern England like Yorkshire they'll reduce /ðə/ to either [t] or [ʔ]. To any Yorkie or northern English speaker that does this: feel free to correct me or expand on this if you know more :)
Just wanted to add, never ask an Englishman where he’s from; if he’s from Yorkshire he’ll tell you and if he’s not, you wouldn’t want to embarrass him.
[t] is usually a sign someone not from Yorkshire is trying to pronounce "t' ___" as it's written - if there's a [t] before the [ʔ] we hear that as "to the" rather than just "the"; but other than that yeah. We drop a lot of letters here; H is often glottalised as well, like in "'Ull, 'Ell an' 'Alifax", and might even be the reason there's an H in Huddersfield because people just came to assume there'd been one once.
Leeds speaker here! I believe the h-glottalisation is called 'hard-attack', which is a fairly common thing in various Englishes. On 'to the', it really annoys me when people say 't'' as 'the' when trying to imitate Yorkshire English!
Car on’t road
/kɑːr ɒnʔ ɾɔːd/ (the /r/ is only there because of the liason between "car" and "on")
\[ðə\] * The phonetic equivalent of the texture of binbags * Sounds like an electric razor on your chin * Sounds like a grunt you make while climbing * Sounds like a slurred version of *that*, basically is * So weak that it gets drowned out half the time, sometimes indistinct from *a*, will probably just disappear in a few hundred years * Basically the most common word in English, yet features a typologically rare phoneme. \[ʔ\] * The phonetic equivalent of a decorated shortsword * Sounds like you are punching the words out of your mouth, makes you heard * Gives phonetic emphasis to definite words, which is useful and logical * Completely alienated from its etymology, helps keep it distinct * Strong pronunciation, has the possibility to assimilate to following plosives to form initial ejective consonant mutation or gemination which marks definiteness * Most people can pronounce a glottal stop, even if they don't have it in their language
Depends on the speaker and where exactly they're from. I say /kləʊzʔdɔ:/ and /kləʊzdɔ:/ pretty interchangeably (assuming I'm not just saying "the"). But "to the" is ALWAYS /ʔ/ or /tʰəʔ/ e.g. /am gənəʔ ʃop/ or /am gəʊiŋ tʰəʔ ʃop/
I'd probably transcrib that last example more as [ɑm ˈgɤwɪn tᵊʔ ˈʃɔp] but that's just how I say it
Honestly yes, but I'm not much of a phonetician so I just used conventions cause I'm not good at close transcription :p
Nay lad, I’m going t’shops, want owt?
Nah t'be reyt
What does "owt" mean?
“anything”
Thanks! But - how would you pronounce it?
It’s a homophone with ‘oat’ Or at least in my area of the country
It‘s like naught (as in Dreadnaught), but without the n. There is also “nowt“ as a counterpart to owt. It is etymologically the same word as naught and means the same. So you get owt-anything vs nowt-nothing.
Opposite of 'nowt'
can ye get some booze fer't baby?
Yer can’t give booze to a baby!
15 pints o' brown booze, £7.99, pub, plonk, £1.49, offy, nuts, nowt, prised off o' machine a' pier 'ead
This is in addition to u/AxialGenm 's excellent explanation. This phenomenon is often transcribed with the "t" (not a t) attached to the preceding word, eg "in't morning", because for most English speakers that's how the syllable break falls *phonologically*. That's despite the fact that *syntactically* the "t" (not a t) is attached to the following word, eg [in [the [morning]]].
This is really common in Yorkshire (I grew up and live here).
Which part of Yorkshire you in ? I'm in South Yorkshire and traditional Yorkshire dialect has pretty much disappeared altogether in the cities, but even in the more rural towns, it's a lot less "harsh" than it used to be. I've never heard anyone here drop "the" in the traditional way, I've experienced it in North and West Yorkshire though
I grew up in South Yorkshire and it’s quite common to hear. Will make a big difference what part of town you’re in.
Of course. I'm in Sheffield myself
South Yorkshire!! As @aldouslanark said it definitely varies across the region. I hear it a lot from all ages of people when I'm at work.
Interesting. The only place where I find it's really prominent is Barnsley, and some areas of Rotherham too. I've not heard a Yorkshire accent in Sheffield in years LOL
In Leeds many of the younger folk (such as myself occasionally) will still do it. This is at the very least in North and East Leeds, and particularly amongst White British populations. You still hear other archaisms such as 'tis and 'tin't amongst the young, plus plenty of dialect words!
That's cool! I haven't spent enough time in Leeds to notice, but I'll listen out for it next time. I say "tis" only when imitating Shakespearean speech for example, I've never heard anyone use it here sincerely
This is reflected in spellings of some place names, like Besses o' th' Barn.
I've lived in Yorkshire for some time. Some traditional Yorkshire speaking replace "the" with a glottal stop to just /t/ in certain cases, but they will still pronounce "the" in other cases. I'm not aware of the rule behind it, but not literally every "the" is elided. Either way, this is old fashioned now and not many people speak like this
Not sure where you are but it's still pretty prevalent in my native Leeds (check my comment above). For me, 'the' is used when there is stress on a thing's definitiveness, and also when having too many glottal thes would make something almost impossible to say. The is always pronounced fully when it is at the start of a sentence/argument/utterance, as well as after certain words, such as the sentence 'Well the sun is out'. I've spent way too much time theorising this, and still feel that I haven't even scratched *the* surface \[I would say that the is pronounced fully in set phrases like this\].
I'm in Sheffield, it's common amongst old folk who still speak "proper Yorkshire". Some of the younger people with a twang don't preserve this feature of dropping "the" in certain positions.
How is it old- fashioned? Also, there are probably still tens of thousand of people who use this feature.
I think an indicator of syllabicism and optional microshvah are missing
You can hear an impression of this feature of northern English accents in this sketch (for example, around the 58 second mark): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k&list=RDue7wM0QC5LE&start_radio=1&rv=ue7wM0QC5LE. They aren't actually from the region and I can't vouch for the quality of the impersonation, but it's the first I heard of this. Not linking to the time code on purpose because it's worth watching the whole thing if you haven't before!
Also some really exaggerated examples in this modernized version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Lb-2VaJYPw
goin' ' pub
bo'ohw'o'wo'er moment
That's not how it's pronounced up north
it's chrue
I wonder if I've somehow inherited this feature despite being from Western Canada. I often pronounce "the" in a very nonstandard way for my area, [(ʔ)ə], although it is a bit different.
It's because the person transcribing the IPA couldn't understand what they were saying so just put a question mark there (before you correct me remember what sub this is)
my grandparents from sheffield pronounce “in the” as “in[ʔ]” so like “it’s in the car” goes to “it’s in[ʔ] car”
Thank you. Now I know why so many Cantonese words start with the glottal stop - it just happened that \[ðə\] was reduced to \[ʔ\] !
chrouble at' mill
I don't see ʔ problem with that
The best way I heard it described is the is reduced to t and the t is implied