Yorkshire dialect

The Yorkshire dialect (also known as Broad Yorkshire, Tyke, Yorkie, or Yorkshire English) is a dialect of English, or continuum of dialects, spoken in the Yorkshire region of Northern England. The dialect has roots in Old English and is influenced by Old Norse. The Yorkshire dialect has faded and faces extinction, but organisations such as The Yorkshire Dialect Society and the East Riding Dialect Society exist to promote its use. The dialect has been represented in classic works of literature such as Wuthering Heights, Nicholas Nickleby and The Secret Garden, and linguists have documented variations of the dialect since the nineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, the Survey of English Dialects collected dozens of valuable recordings of authentic Yorkshire dialects. In the fragments of early dialect work, there seems to have been few distinctions across large areas: in the early 14th century, the traditional Northumbrian dialect of Yorkshire showed few differences with the dialect spoken at Aberdeen, now often considered a separate Scots language. The dialect has been widely studied since the 19th century, with an early work by William Stott Banks in 1865 on the dialect of Wakefield, and another by Joseph Wright who used an early form of phonetic notation in a description of the dialect of Windhill, near Bradford. Significant works that covered all of England include Alexander John Ellis's 1899 book On Early English Pronunciation, Part V, and the English Dialect Dictionary, which was published in six volumes between 1898 and 1905. Charles Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby (1839) and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) are notable nineteenth century works of literature which include examples of contemporary Yorkshire dialects.