ONE of my newspapers recently carried a feature about Yorkshire Dialect, but this title is not entirely accurate.

There is no such thing as a single Yorkshire dialect – there are dozens or even hundreds of dialects within this huge county with more along the coastline and others reflecting the neighbouring counties or conurbations.

The definition of dialect itself a puzzle because people from outside the county often refer to the dialect when in fact they really mean a Yorkshire accent.

People from various parts of the former West Riding will use the word were when in fact they mean was while York residents can be recognised because they rarely pronounce the letter T when it appears in the middle or end of a word. “I’m feeling better because I got a letter” becomes “I’m feeling be**er because I go* a le**er.”

I should add that there is nothing wrong about the way we speak – even grammatical errors can be tolerated in day-to-day chatter, but the point is that our speech can provide clues as to our native areas and perhaps the local manner of speech we heard and spoke as children.

I can recall my grandmother calling me a canny lad, but she came from the Sunderland area and her chatter revealed her association with that locality.

So what do we mean by the word dialect? It may include an accent but it also depends on unusual words that are particularly associated with a locality, district or one of our splendid Dales.

In the past the people of Wensleydale spoke quite differently from those in Swaledale, and in turn, the residents of both those dales spoke unlike the people of Teesdale or those living in the North York Moors, the East Riding Wolds or the West Riding.

I recall working in Whitby where the fisherfolk spoke a dialect which was quite different from that of people living in the nearby moors. I heard a fisherman say to another “Vairst du gahin?” which means “Where are you going?” – very like the Germanic phrase “Vo gehst du?” which means the same thing.

My Concise Oxford Dictionary defines dialect as a form of language which is peculiar to a specific region or social group. In discussions about our dialects we tend to omit social groups and their manner of speech which we might dismiss simply as jargon.

Certainly if you overhear two business-folk chatting over a meal, their discussion is usually incomprehensible to outsiders because they use “business-speak” which is often liberally interspaced with the use of initials. For example, “DG interacted with JB to facilitate a head-to-head about the proposed re-direction of FD17XF”.

This might have been a chat about the design of a new car or anything else. But is such speech a form of dialect?

It seems to fit the dictionary definition and there is no doubt that organisations like sports clubs, social clubs and various societies who deal with matters like the arts, music, literature and so forth, all have their own jargon which can be incomprehensible to outsiders.

In the course of my work, I need access to dialect words because they might be spoken by one of my fictional characters. I have A Dictionary of the North Riding Dialect written by Sir Alfred Pease in 1928 which remains a most useful source of curious words.

Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby, in their book The Yorkshire Dales, included a short list of dialect words from Swaledale and Wensleydale.

Richard Blakeborough, father of Major J Fairfax-Blakeborough, compiled a list of North Riding dialect words in his book – Wit, Character, Folkore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1911) which is on my shelves, and for West Riding words I rely on Arnold Kellett’s Yorkshire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore (1994).

I have to say that many words are similar in all those areas, even when spoken with differing accents.

In Swaledale and Wensleydate, maffly meant muddled or not-so-well, but in other parts of the North Riding the word waffly indicated someone muddled and unsure of themselves.

Arnold Kellett features waffly as meaning unsteady or dizzy while Blakeborough says it means undecided or wavering. And, of course, all these words are spoken with different accents.

Like most dialect speakers (as I was when a child), I have my favourite words, one of which is thrang. A local saying was “Ah’s as thrang as Throp’s wife”. Thrang mean very busy and it appears that Throp’s wife was “That thrang she hanged hersen wiv a dishclout.”

Clarty is a good word which means messy, while snow when drifting is usually described as “All happed in”. Someone who was old before their time was said to be crambazzled while the most useful word was fettle. This could mean anything from the state of one’s health to fixing something that was broken.