While reading around the topic of glottalization, I looked at the Wikipedia article on Yorkshire Dialect. For those not familiar with the Yorkshire accent, I should explain that there is a special type of assimilation, called Yorkshire Assimilation by John Wells, which results in a final voiced consonant becoming devoiced when followed by a voiceless consonant. Thus the /d/ at the end of ‘wide’ /waɪd/ becomes /t/ in ‘wide trousers’ as a result of the initial /t/ in the second word; as a result, in most of West Yorkshire you can’t hear a difference between ‘wide trousers’ and ‘white trousers’. Soon after moving to Yorkshire, I got a surprise when I heard a local man in a café in Bridlington order a crab sandwich. It sometimes sounds as if a final voiced plosive becomes either a glottal stop or a glottalized consonant, though I’m not sure about that. I’m pretty sure this process doesn’t apply in the case of final voiced fricatives, but occasionally I think I hear an example in an environment like ‘raise cash’, giving /reɪs kæʃ/.
In the WP article the description of this phenomenon is very brief, and refers only to Malcolm Petyt’s study and not to the Wells Accents of English (pp 366-7). It also cites as an example /æpsəluːtli/ for ‘absolutely’, which though certainly accurate doesn’t sound particularly Yorkshire to me.
Yesterday we went to see the disappointing film of Alan Bennett’s ‘The Lady in the Van’. The character of Bennett’s mother has a go at a West Yorkshire accent, but gets it wrong when she says ‘She smells like a bad dishcloth’ and pronounces ‘bad’ as /bæt/. This doesn’t fit the rule, of course. ‘Bad tea-towel’ would have been appropriate for pronouncing ‘bad’ as /bæt/.
In the WP article the description of this phenomenon is very brief, and refers only to Malcolm Petyt’s study and not to the Wells Accents of English (pp 366-7). It also cites as an example /æpsəluːtli/ for ‘absolutely’, which though certainly accurate doesn’t sound particularly Yorkshire to me.
Yesterday we went to see the disappointing film of Alan Bennett’s ‘The Lady in the Van’. The character of Bennett’s mother has a go at a West Yorkshire accent, but gets it wrong when she says ‘She smells like a bad dishcloth’ and pronounces ‘bad’ as /bæt/. This doesn’t fit the rule, of course. ‘Bad tea-towel’ would have been appropriate for pronouncing ‘bad’ as /bæt/.
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