Anecdotal findings from BBC Look North have been uncovered in Sheffield’s local contract trace service, showing that if the phone operators use 0114 numbers and Sheffield accents, the service has more success. It is currently successfully reaching 80% of the people they’re trying to track down. Some of the people who they are getting through to, the national track and trace service failed to reach.
The Yorkshire accent might be helping during the coronavirus pandemic, with more people in the region being reached by the local test and trace teams@BBCJamesVincentpic.twitter.com/bSlxav9ieQ
James Vincent who reported this story contacted me for comment on these findings and to hear some perspective from sociolinguistic research about why this might be. Here are my thoughts…
The Sheffield accent is broadly evaluated in positive ways in previous research into language attitudes, and regarded as sounding ‘friendly’ and ‘trustworthy’. In particular we find it to be socially marked, in that the variation of features of Sheffield speech pattern according to social class status and age of the speaker. We also know that local accents have the potential to symbolise solidarity amongst speakers who live in the same region and use the same features of local speech – something which we see in Sheffield!
These two impacts of the Sheffield accent on people’s perceptions (friendliness and solidarity) are likely to be exacerbating the success that Sheffield Track and Trace phone operators are having when contacting Sheffielders.
When people pick up the phone and hear a voice that sounds familiar to them, they are more likely to feel relaxed in the interaction with the phone operator. Even if the recipient of the phone call isn’t a local, they are likely to have positive associations with the Sheffield accent, as opposed to a Standard English voice which has been shown to rank lower in terms of trustworthiness.
In my own previous research into perceptions of Yorkshire dialects, Yorkshire folk are regarded as being honest and upfront. Locals claim that hearing someone with a Yorkshire accent can put them at ease, and give them an instant feeling of connection and common understanding with the speaker they are interacting with.
This is important when it comes to track and trace phone calls, as the phone operator is getting in touch with members of the public in order to seek information about their personal contacts and interactions. In order for people to disclose this information, they need to feel comfortable and relaxed throughout the interaction. In this case, a Standard English accented voice may come across as sounding more authoritative, and may lead the recipients of track and trace calls to hold onto information about the people they’ve come into contact with in the fear that they will be penalised for their actions.
A Yorkshire accent comes in very handy here, as listening to someone who sounds more on your level may lead to a more honest interaction, and therefore more successful track and trace procedures which can lead to appropriate individuals isolating and stopping the spread of Covid-19.
This is exciting news, as it shows the potential for regional accent in improving track and trace protocol and improving its success rate on a local level, which could help get us all out of lockdown – and the sooner the better!
For those who are completely unfamiliar with the variety of English that is found in the city of Sheffield, I thought I’d write about what constitutes the Sheffield accent – with more to follow soon on the local dialect. And if you are familiar with the Sheffield accent, or you have one yourself, then you might be able to relate!
Sheffield is a large urban, post-industrial, British city, which has a city centre characterized by its multiculturalism, diversity and growing cosmopolitanism. As you travel outside of the inner city you will find densely populated suburbs and eventually quaint villages that border the peak district and North Derbyshire, or neighbouring Yorkshire towns such as Rotherham and Barnsley. The diverse social landscape of the city has had huge impact on the way that language is used amongst it’s in habitants, and this is the main topic of interest in my own PhD study. Sheffield is well-known for it’s pioneering impact upon the British Steel Industry which branded it with the name ‘Steel City’, as well as for the Cutlery industry that once thrived here. It is also well known for its fierce football rivalry between United and Wednesday, and is very popular with students with the two world-leading Universities which the city boasts, namely the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam. The friendly nature of the place has gained it the highest retention rates for graduates who finish studying in Sheffield and opt to stay here to work and live long term.
Photo taken by me from the Steel Steps behind Sheffield Train Station
As a native of the city, I grew up surrounded by the Sheffield accent in the East End of Sheffield, which is typically regarded as the working-class part of the city. Research has demonstrated a linguistic and socio-economic divide within the city between the East and the West, with the latter being home to more middle-class speakers (Finnegan 2015). Broadly speaking, one of the main trends in sociolinguistics across the UK demonstrates that middle class speakers are more likely to use standard variants to avoid stigmatization, whereas working-class speakers use non-standard variants and attach covert prestige to the use of such features. This means that working-class speakers in the East end of Sheffield might be more likely to speak with ‘broader’ accents and that it is desirable for them to do so, whereas in the West end you might hear people speaking more ‘proper.’ These evaluative terms often arise in the study of language attitudes where speakers are encouraged to express their beliefs and judgements towards particular ways of speaking.
What is the Sheffield Accent?
You might be wondering ‘what constitutes a broad Sheffield accent?’ – something which I will now consider, mentioning some of the phonetic variants that are typical of Sheffield speech – from my own experience as well as attestations in previous linguistic research. It is impossible to fit the array of available features of the accent into one short blog post, but I will describe some of the more common and recognisable features as examples. There is also the consideration of dialect words and morpho-syntax – topics that I will be writing separate blogposts on soon.
(Definitions of these as well as other linguistic jargon that you may be unfamiliar with are provided on the glossary page)
One interesting feature, that is significant enough to have branded Sheffielders with the name ‘deedah’s’ [diː dɑːz] (Stoddart and others 1999), is the use of Old English address terms ‘thee and thou’, when communicating with fellow locals. This is also paired with th-stopping, in which the dental fricative [ð] is replaced with a dental stop [d] – or the interchanging of the ‘th’ and ‘d’ sound initially so that you might hear the following sentence:
‘nah den dee how’s da doin?‘ [naː dɛn di aːs da duɪn]
Which translates to
‘now then you how you doing?’
Which in Standard English means
‘Hello you, how are you doing?’
However, research suggests that th-stopping is now in decline, and is most common in the speech of older speakers (Stoddart and others 1999).
A common division between Northern and Southern English is the distinction between the STRUT and BATH vowels. We expect to find the vowel in FOOT [ʊ] up North and in Sheffield, whereas in Southern varieties we would expect to hear the [ᴧ] in STRUT. As well this we hear the short [a] in the word TRAP up North and in Sheffield, whereas down south we would expect to hear the long [ɑ:] in BATH – which would sound something like ‘barth’.
Something that Sheffield speakers in my own previous research have been able to pick up on is the use of long vowels in the city, as in a lot of words we see monophthongization (a shift from a diphthong with two combined vowel sounds to a monophthong which has just one), with Sheffielders replacing Standard English diphthongs with an elongated monophthong so that for instance:
Price becomes ‘prahs’ or [praɪs]→[praːs]
Now becomes ‘nah’ or [naʊ]→[naː]
Rain becomes ‘rehn’ or [reɪn]→[reːn]
Another common feature is the use of short monophthongs [a] and [ɛ] in some FACE words, which are restricted lexically. This means that they only occur in certain words, which include ‘gave, make and take’, which sound more like ‘gev, mek and tek.’ The variant [ɛ] was evidenced in Stoddart et al.’s (1999) study (cited in Finnegan2015). However, interestingly recent research has demonstrated that the closing diphthong [ɛɪ] is favoured over the long close-mid monopthhong [eː], but mainly in the speech of Middle Class Sheffield speakers (Finnegan 2015:227). This demonstrates that within Sheffield there are a variety of accent pronunciations that each have the potential to index different types of local identity. This is something which I aim to explore further in my own project.
Sheffield is a border town of Yorkshire, and is in contact with Derbyshire linguistic features, which contain more stereotypically southern pronunciations. For example there are ‘frequent opportunities for Sheffield speakers to come into regular contact with speakers using the FACE and GOAT closing diphthong forms in their local accents’, which are regarded as more standard pronunciations, and this could behaving an impact upon the Sheffield dialect (Finnegan 2015:228). This could mean that we see Dialect change in Sheffield because of the influence of surrounding varieties.
Another common feature of the Sheffield accent is what linguists term happY-laxing. In the word happy for example, the last syllable is often pronounced as ‘eh’, as in ‘appeh’ or [apε]. As well as this we see regular H-dropping – the lack of word-initial [h] – evident in the previous example. Also a recognisable feature is the use of reflexives such as me’sen [miˈsεn] for myself and his’sen [ɪzˈsεn] himself (Stoddart et al 1999), and yourself sometimes becomes thi’sen [ðɪˈsεn].
The prominence of these features is evidenced in the commodification of their use in Sheffield dialect branded products that can be purchased in the city as gifts and souvenirs. Cooper (2017) points out that the use of dialect on commodities demonstrates a wider awareness of the feature as part of a local vernacular. I often see examples when I’m in and around the city and take photos, and have added some examples below:
Found in Castle Market on the Moor.
Found in the Millenium galleries shop. Also in the Millenium galleries shop.
Sheffielders are also known to pronounce the word right as reyt or rate, and this variant is often used as an intensifier in the local lexis or dialect (Beal 2009). This means that you would expect to hear it in phrases like ‘that is reyt good’ or ‘i am reyt chuffed!’
[raɪt] → [reɪt] or [reːt]
The last feature which I will mention is the realisation of Definite Article Reduction, or in other words ‘the tendency in Yorkshire to drop the definite article ‘the’, or to reduce it to a glottal stop’ (Cooper 2013). This is something that is common across the whole of Yorkshire, and most commonly discussed in the example ‘goin’ t’shop.’ In Sheffield we see glottalisation and the zero article (‘goin shop’), in which ‘the’ is omitted completely.
I hope this has been an informative introduction! Any feedback is welcomed as it will help me to improve my future posts and to make sure that I am putting out useful and interesting content. Please either comment below or contact me. My next blog post will look into dialect more specifically.
References
Beal, Joan C. 2009. ‘“You’re Not from New York City, You’re from Rotherham”: Dialect and Identity in British Indie Music’, Journal of English Linguistics, 37.3: 223–40 <https://doi.org/10.1177/0075424209340014>
Chambers, J. K. 2013. ‘Patterns of Variation Including Change’, in The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, 2nd edn, ed. by J. K. Chambers and Natalie Schilling-Estes (Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell), pp. 297–323
Finnegan, Katie. 2015. ‘Sheffield’, in Researching Northern English, ed. by Raymond Hickey (Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company), pp. 227–50
Stoddart, Jana, Clive Upton, and J.D.A Widdowson. 1999. ‘Sheffield Dialect in the 1990s: Revisiting the Concept of NORMs’, in Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, ed. by Paul Foulkes and Gerard J. Docherty (London : New York: Arnold ; Oxford University Press), pp. 72–89
I have started this blog as a platform for me to share my experiences and findings as part of my PhD journey into studying Dialect Continuity and Change in Sheffield. I will also be using this as a tool to reflect on my progress and thoughts and to document my developments throughout my project.
Go ahead and follow me if you are interested in Sheffield Accent and Dialect or Sociolinguistic Language Variation and Change more broadly. Or maybe you’re just interested in finding out more about the life of a PhD student and what a project of this nature is going to involve.
My first blog post will be uploaded imminently, until then, as we say in Sheffield, Sithee!
I have recently been involved in an exciting project in collaboration with Poet in the city, The British Library and Sheffield Libraries. Digesting History is a part of the Collections in Verse project, which aims to bring exhibitions to life through poetry. The work in Sheffield was inspired by the British Library’s sold-out exhibition Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War.
As part of this event, I did a talk at Firth Park Library, with Kayo Chingonyi, an incredible poet, former Sheffield resident, and University of Sheffield Alumni. Kayo’s poetry covers themes including: coming of age, grime, roots and origins of language, and identity.
Kayo uses figures of local speech from Sheffield to inspire his poetry for this project, after conversing with locals in the Firth Park area, and cataloguing instances of Sheffield English usage from library visitors. Examples are the terms, ‘loppy’, ‘jennel’ and ‘siling down’.
During the event in Firth Park library (which was the last time Kayo and I took part in an in-person public event!), I spoke about local history in Sheffield, and explored how social change has influenced locals’ language use. This gave historical context to Kayo’s poetry, which connects the use of local language features to place and Sheffield communities.
A finale event was scheduled at Sheffield Library last year, which couldn’t go ahead because of Lockdown restrictions. However, the awesome team led by Ruby Baker from Poet in The City, made this event a virtual reality. It premiered last week and, to maintain a sense of community and shared experience, audience members were invited to watch along and enjoy a three course meal together, accompanied by 3 courses of conversation:
The ‘starter’ contains a presentation by Claire Breay, covering the Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition, and touching on: Underrepresentation of women, formation of kingdoms, and English language development. This is followed by Joe Kriss’ poetry, which explores how the formation of kingdoms in the early medieval period prompts us to consider the notion of national identity today.
The ‘main course’ includes my conversation about social change and language, and Kayo’s awesome poetry!
The ‘desert’ is a Q&A with Dan Marshall about how Sheffield Libraries have adapted during the pandemic, exploring libraries’ role in communities during this period. This is followed by Rachel Bowers’ epic song, telling the story of what is loved, treasured and lost, based on stories from local women.
A video of the event is now online, which contains all of the above, as well as an awesome film by Eelyn Lee called ‘Where Two Rivers Meet’, which tells the story of Collections in Verse: Sheffield, which saw collaborations between communities, libraries and poets. In this film at [2:05], Kayo’s section begins, showcasing sound clips of people from Firth Park speaking in Sheffield dialect, which were part of his inspiration. This is a must watch for Sheffield speech enthusiasts!
Here is the full online event
My talk about social history in Sheffield, which gives context to some of the ideas that Kayo explores, is featured in the online event [53:04], which you can watch on Youtube if you are interested in hearing it. It was good fun recording this talk over zoom with Ruby, although it did seem strange to record a speech in advance for a sit at home audience! In the talk you will hear me discuss how Sheffield came to be a place, how the topography of the area has influenced the character of the city. I unpick how 100 years of rapid social change has influenced linguistic variation in Sheffield, including how local speech forms are socially stratified according to age, place, social class and heritage.
Check out Kayo’s blog post on Big Issue North about this same event and poetry!
Since the start of this year I have been working on a collaborative project with local Stonemason and letter carver Steve Roche. Together we have designed a carved stone piece which contains relics of Sheffield Speech spoken by a range of speakers born at 25 year intervals across the last century.
The phrases are from the archive used in my research into variation and change in the Sheffield dialect across 100 years, in response to rapid social change in Sheffield – in particular a shift from industrialism to service sector industry and urban regeneration.
Videography by Sam Walker puzzleglass.com
Steve has carved these phrases into Mouselow stone, which was sourced locally within Sheffield, with accompanying IPA symbols from linguistics which represent the differences in vowel sounds that are specific to local Sheffield Speech.
Photography by Joe Horner @joehornerphoto
The font used for the inscription belongs to the University and is called Klang. It was designed in 1955 by a brilliant letter carver and type designer called Will Carter. It seemed fitting to use this font, in particular as it was designed in the middle of the century in which my research is focused upon.
The purpose of the project was to answer the question ‘Is the Sheffield Accent set in Stone?’ We aimed to represent the range of variation in the FACE and GOAT Lexical sets which I am investigating in Sheffield speech (or the ‘oh’ and ‘ay’ sounds). The variety of IPA symbols represented under the phrases demonstrate that across the last century of Sheffield speech in my archive there is plenty of linguistic variation , and therefore the Sheffield accent is certainly not set in stone! As I conclude the research in the coming months, I will be posting more about exactly what the changes in Sheffield speech are, and how the accent is socially stratified across the city.
If you would like to see the completed installation it will be exhibited at the Millenium Galleries for the next 10 days (17th-27th September 2020) in the Futurecade exhibition as part of the Univeristy of Sheffield’s Festival of The Mind 2020. Find out more about the FOTM 2020 here.
You can hear these phrases spoken by the locals in my archive below…
Speaker 1 DOB 1902
Speaker 2 DOB 1925
Speaker 3 DOB 1950
Speaker 4 DOB 1975
Speaker 5 DOB 2001
Below are some images of the finished piece! Check out more of Steve’s work at rochestone.co.uk
In case you missed it, I have recently had an article published in the Sheffield Star, which introduces my research into Sheffield Dialect continuity and change!
I have now been studying my PhD on Sheffield Dialects for 6 months, and saw this as a fitting time to reflect on what I’ve done so far.
If you have opened up this post expecting to see more examples of Sheffield dialect, rest assured that my next post is going to be providing you with more Sheffield dialect words from the several glossaries that I have compiled throughout my studies so far! If you interested in knowing more about my reflections from my project so far, as well as what I am going to be trying to answer during my project, then keep reading…
Over the last six months I have managed to come up with a lot more questions that I want to answer! I am now in a position where I have listened to each of the approximately 130 interviews which have been recorded and archived in Special collections. This means that I now have a better sense of what I am and am not going to be able to find out from the content that is available to me.
One of the most exciting developments is that the interviews cover topics related to place and local identity, meaning that Sheffielders talk about Sheffield and their opinions of the city as well as those of fellow Sheffielders. This means that I will be able to study these attitudes and see how they might have been shaped over time, by looking into what people have got to say about social change.
The opening of Meadowhall and the Super Tram are prime examples of gentrification in Sheffield in the early nineties that were a hot topic for Sheffield people at the time. A more recent example would be the gentrification of the Moor shopping centre and marketplace in the city centre. People tend to reveal their attitudes towards their local area in conversations on such topics and in their comparisons of how things were before and after these changes.
I also want to find out how locals’ attitudes to Sheffield or what is known as place orientation could impact their language use. Could it be that those who orient more to their local area tend to use more local Sheffield dialect words or features, and do they do so at specific points of interaction in conversations when they are showing a firmer stance of locality? This is something that I will be able to explore further.
A huge accomplishment that I have been able to achieve is that I have managed to shape up my corpus (or the collection of tapes), into comparable samples from the two time frames available to me in the archives. This consisted to a lot of listening to material using, both an audio-cassette and reel-to-reel player, the latter of which I’d never came across since last September!
I have also spent that last 6 months developing my understanding of phonetics, which means that I am now able to carry out socio-phonetic analysis. Broadly speaking, this will mean that I am able to take the speech sounds from one time frame and compare them to those from another time frame by finding out numerical figures for each sound that are measurable. Different generations can also be used for means of comparison to explore whether older speakers use different features to younger speakers.
I will then be able to create visualizations or graphs to demonstrate these findings and check whether or not they are significant using stats – and ultimately be able to prove quantitatively whether change or continuity is happening to Sheffield speech sounds.
However, I enjoyed listening to the material in their original formats and getting to know my data sets. I am now able to better understand the themes and topics that arise in the interviews as well as get to know the participants as well as I can. This will allow me to better interpret the figures which I elicit from my quantitative/numerical analysis by combining some qualitative analysis. This means that I will think about what has happened in society in Sheffield and how attitudes and opinions are changing, as well as what the people in my interviews are talking about, when it comes to explaining why continuity or change is happening within the dialect.
I have also had the opportunity to present my research project to colleagues at the University of Sheffield, as well as at a sociolinguistics event at the University of York called HaCKS (find out more here https://hacksocioling.com/), and most excitingly at the University of Copenhagen at the Sociolinguistics Winterschool. The pictures above taken by my colleague Nathaniel Dziura give you an insight into our time exploring Copenhagen! These were all great experiences where I received some valuable feedback and questions to consider about my own project, and gained confidence and reassurance that all is going well!
If you want to find out more about my project and get regular updates then sign up with your email address to be notified when I publish new posts!
I thought it was about time that I give you all a bit more of an insight into my research. As you may already know, my goal for my PhD is to find out if the Sheffield speech is changing. But most importantly, why am I doing this?
A lot of Sheffield locals or ‘deedahs’ like dialects and care about the fact that true ‘deedahs’ might be dying out. I will hopefully be able to find out if this is the case. The interest that this blog has received from local people and the supportive and inquisitive emails that I receive from people who want to know and tell me more demonstrates this. Previous research in Sheffield can also vouch for the fact that Sheffielders are proud of the city, and specifically the local speech which is a massive part of our regional identity (Finnegan 2011).
IKEA using Sheffield Dialect to appeal to the locals – photo credit Nathaniel Dziura
The Sheffield Dialect in general has been the subject of dialect dictionaries, as well as previous sociolinguistic research for at least 2 centuries. Contemporary commodification of dialect words and phrases on souvenirs and advertisements in and around the city are living proof that people take notice of local language. A local variety is commodified when products go on sale with dialect featured on them and people are prepared to buy them. Below are some examples of products in Sheffield that can be bought with Dialect on them – this is significant because it shows that Sheffield words are emblematic of place and demonstrates a wider awareness of features of local speech.
Although Sheffield speech has been investigated in the past,
my study is the first to investigate the dialect over such a long time-depth –
a massive 100 years! I am lucky enough to have access to the necessary
resources including pre-existing recordings from the past, and contemporary software
which can assist me to complete the analysis that I need.
In general these findings will also be applicable in wider
sociolinguistics because of what I will find out about social change and how it
impacts language – and the social climate in Sheffield is an interesting one.
Sheffield is typically divided between the south-west in which inhabitants tend to be more middle class, and the north-east in which people are more working class, which could have implications for language use. We have some of the poorest and richest wards in the UK both in close proximity and within the same city. As well as this Sheffield’s border status in Yorkshire means that we have more contact with speakers from southern parts of the country, in particular the East Midlands and Derbyshire, and this is also influential (Finnegan 2015).
More broadly I want to be able to let people know about Sheffield Dialect and why people here talk the way they do. Overall it will be fascinating to find out what in particular is shaping the way Sheffieldiers speak.
So where am I going to start? To be able to track change across such a long time span I need access to recordings of speakers from Sheffield who have lived at various points during this century to enable me to analyse their speech.
Luckily enough there are roughly 130 pre-existing recordings at the University of Sheffield’s Special Collections of local people being interviewed. Some of which are so old that their formats are audio reels and audio-cassettes – meaning I had to use one of these to listen to a lot of them before they were digitized ↓
A reel-to-reel audio player and recorder
The collection is made up of two samples, one from 1981 and another from 1997. Within both samples there are speakers of a variety of:
Locations within Sheffield
Social Class
Educational level
Ages from between 12 and 82
The sample can therefore be divided by these criteria to test what effect these factors might have upon the language that speakers use.
I will add a further sample to this collection by recording speakers in the modern day, a further 20 years on since the last time frame. This will contain speakers who are divided up by the same criteria for comparability. Over all I can then test how the language might have changed or stayed the same between the three 20 year time intervals and within the different generations at each point.
To look for sound changes I will need to transcribe the interviews and then use computer software which is able to measure speech sounds and give a numerical value which can then be tested using statistics to prove whether or not there are any differences between samples – I will be using a specific process called forced alignment.
As well as this I am going to be considering how social change in the city may have impacted upon the way that language is used here – for example:
increasing social and geographical mobility since the end of WWII meaning that people now move around a lot more and change jobs
deindustrialization with the decline of the steel works and a shift to the service sector where people now are more likely to be in customer facing jobs – this brings new demands on individuals to speak in more standard ways (Coupland 2010)
the influx of students and the ‘eds and meds culture’ (Beal 2009) meaning more students, professionals and people working in the hospitals
A view of the Sheffield City Centre from the University’s Arts Tower
Sheffield has also seen lots of gentrification recently. As a result of this, and the factors listed above, communities around Sheffield now tend to be less close-knit – and are no longer focused around the steel industry which most tended to be in the 20th century (see Hey 2005). Changing circumstances like this can influence the contexts in which people interact as well as the people they interact with. If like me you’re itching to find out how exactly this has influenced the local language in the city then subscribe to my blog to find out more as my research progresses.
I will be writing further blog posts on what I get up to on my research journey into finding all this stuff out and what I have managed to do so far in the coming months! If there’s anything in particular about the Sheffield Dialect that you would like to see me blog about then please get in touch via the comments below or by email→johanna.blakey@sheffield.ac.uk
References
Beal, J. C. 2009. ‘ENREGISTERMENT, COMMODIFICATION, AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT: “GEORDIE” VERSUS “SHEFFIELDISH”’, American Speech, 84.2: 138–56
Coupland, Nikolas. 2010. ‘Language, Ideology, Media and Social Change’, in Performing the Self, ed. by Karen Junod and D Maillat (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag), pp. 127–51
Finnegan, Katie. 2011. Linguistic variation, stability and change in middle-class Sheffield English. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Sheffield, Sheffield.
Finnegan, Katie. 2015. ‘Sheffield’, in Researching Northern English, ed. by Raymond Hickey (Amsterdam ; Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company), pp. 227–50
Hey, David. 2005. ‘The South Yorkshire Steel Industry and the Industrial Revolution’, Northern History, 42.1: 91–96
Ey up! In this blog post I am going to be listing and explaining just a small proportion of the words and phrases that were once or still are heard on the streets of Sheffield. I asked the people of Sheffield to tell me about their dialect and they provided me with the goods. The words that have been included have been sent to me by Sheffield people themselves. If you can think of any more or recognize any of the ones that I’m going to share with you then please let me know in the comments.
I have consulted some of the available Sheffield Dialect Glossaries of the past which I could find in the University of Sheffield’s Western Bank library – as well as one’s which I have at home – to see which words have had their use attested in previous centuries.
Three of the Sheffield Dialect Books that I consulted, one from each of the 19th, 20th and 21st Century!
‘Nah Then!’ is a common way to greet your fellow Sheffielders or to instigate a conversation. This can still be heard on the streets of Sheffield, where you might hear someone instigate a conversation with an old friend with the phrase ‘Nah then pal, how’s it going?’. Nah then or ‘Naden’ as Whomersly puts it in his 1981 ‘Sheffieldish: A Beginners Phrase-book’, can also be used in a more confrontational context, when someone is trying to instigate an argument or to answer back.
Laik is a more traditional dialect word, used in the context of ‘playing out’ or hanging with friends as a youngster, and we would expect it to be heard in the phrase ‘are tha laikin’?’. This term is found in the Hallamshire Glossary of local dialect words produced by Sheffield born Rev. Joseph Hunter between 1828-31. Hunter collected these words during a 20 year period between 1790 and 1810.
Flit is a traditional Sheffield word which is used in the context of relocating or moving house, also attested in the Hallamshire Glossary. If a family on your street have flitted they have moved to another area.
Reckon up is a phrase which in Sheffield means adding up or calculating an amount of money. I have previously heard this used in the context of bar staff adding up the cost of a round of drinks when serving customers, where being able to reckon up without using the till is a vital skill on a busy shift. The use of the term ‘Reckon Up’ to mean ‘to calculate or estimate’ is evidenced on the EDD (English Dialect Dictionary) Online. This is a webiste which can be used to search for meanings of Dialect words and to find evidence of when and where the term has been used in the past, and can be accessed by the following link http://eddonline-proj.uibk.ac.at/edd/index.jsp.
Another word that I have been provided with is Champion, one of the words that Sheffielder’s use to mean ‘great’ or ‘excellent’ – as defined by Hannah Crawford (2015) in her ‘Dee-Dar Book’ of Sheffield Dialect and folklore – so that we might hear the phrase ‘Sheffield is Champion!’.
Loppy is another word, used for being filthy or unclean. If your dog came home from a walk in the rain and was covered in mud and puddle water it would be referred to as loppy. It is mentioned by Crawford (2015) as meaning ‘dirty’.
Somebody who is Nesh feels the cold more than other people, or is feeling cold in that particular moment. This more contemporary meaning which is also found in the Hallamshire glossary, has however changed since that attested in Abel Bywater’s ‘The Sheffield Dialect’ glossary from 1854, in which Nesh means ‘poor spirited.’
Siling down is used when it is raining heavily. The word Sile is found in the book ‘A Glossary of Words used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield’, compiled by S.O. Addy in 1888, with the definition ‘to rain hard’. This glossary was written for the English Dialect Society at a time when efforts were being made to preserve and documents features of local dialect through the compilation of a series of dialect glossaries from various parts of the UK.
This illustration is by Whitworth, found in Derek Whomersley’s ‘Sheffieldish – A Begginer’s Phrase-book’
Also attested in the same glossary, and still in use, is the word Pikelet. In Sheffield this now generally refers to what are more widely known as crumpets, however traditionally Pikelets were a seperate thing, defined in Addy’s 1888 glossary as ‘a thin round cake, made of flour, eggs, milk and yeast.’
Dishclout is another term that was mentioned to me, which denotes a dish cloth often made from an old vest or pair of pants – always handy for spillages – another one that is attested in Addy’s 1888 glossary.
Mardy Thanks to the Arctic Monkeys everybody knows of the Sheffield Dialect phrase ‘Mardy Bum’, which is used to refer to a person who has ‘got the face on’ or in other words is sulking and being moody. This word has been around a long time, and we know this because it is listed in dialect glossaries since as far back as Addy’s in 1888, where it is defined as referring to ‘a spoiled child.’
This illustration is by Whitworth, found in Derek Whomersley’s ‘Sheffieldish – A Begginer’s Phrase-book’
Love or Duck are commonly used as a term of address by Sheffielder’s, as pointed out in Whomersly’s (1981) ‘Sheffieldish’ phrasebook, in the statement ‘You must not be shocked when you are addressed as ‘luv’ or ‘duck’, aimed at newcomers to Sheffield.
Spice is the word that some Sheffielder’s use to name sweets or confectionary, or as mentioned in the Hallamshire Glossary ‘any sweetmeats given to children’ (1983:84) as the meaning used to extend to dried fruits, puddings and deserts.
Snap is what Sheffielders call food on the go or a packed dinner which somebody takes to work to eat. This is found in Addy’s 1888 Glossary, and here we learn that this word was most commonly used amongst workmen, and thus we might have expected its use to be traditional of industrial life in Sheffield and common within mining and steelworks communities. And to avoid any confusion in the use of the word dinner, this is used for the meal at midday, with tea being used to refer to the meal that is eaten in the early evening or at teatime – Sheffielder’s use the ‘Breakfast-Dinner-Tea’ format as opposed to ‘Breakfast-Lunch-Dinner’.
Incase you were wondering where Sheffielder’s stand in the whole bread debate, in the steel city you will find the word Breadcake, not roll or bap or barm. On every chip shop menu in the city you will find the term ‘breadcake’ under side/extras.
A Picture of the menu at Sheffield’s Castle Market Chippy, with bread cakes on offer!
And that small passageway that you use as a shortcut between two streets or blocks of houses, that’s a Jennel in Sheffield, not a ginnel or alleyway. This word is found in Addy’s 1888 glossary of Sheffield words, defined as ‘an entry, a narrow passage between two or more houses.’
Just to confuse you even more, Sheffielder’s will substitute til in phrases such as ‘9 til 5’ for while. This is something that I personally didn’t realise was a Sheffield feature until leaving Sheffield and telling my non-Sheffield work colleagues that I was working a 7 while close to be met with a stark lack of understanding.
Fettle which means ‘to make clean’, is another word which has been part of the discussion. This word can be found in both the Hallamshire Glossary and Addy’s Sheffield Glossary of 1888. We would expect to hear this term in a phrase such as ‘I need to give my living room a good fettle.’
Now obviously these are just a small minority of the many Sheffield Dialect words that can be heard on the streets of Sheffield. There are also many words from the past that are falling out of use or have already been lost. If you are interested in me writing further posts like this one where I write about more dialect words and phrases please let me know in the comments. And again if there are any more that you know of and would like to share, or if you recognise or use any of the ones above, then please feel free to comment below!
References
Addy, Sidney Oldall. 1888. A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield, English Dialect Society (London: Trübner)
Bywater, Abel. 1854. The
Sheffield Dialect (Sheffield: Rodgers and Fowler)
Crawford, Hannah. 2015. Sheffield
Dialect: The Deer-Dar Book (Great Britain: Amazon)
Hunter, Joseph. 1983. The
Hallamshire Glossary (Sheffield: University of Sheffield, Centre for
English Cultural Tradition and Language)
Whomersley, Derek. 1981. Sheffieldish:
A Beginners Phrase-Book (Sheffield: City of Sheffield Publicity Department)
Steel City Spiel 