Only when we're making fun of Spice Girls.

Thanks, Bill.

Oh yeah forgot about her.

Not excessively but a person with a halfway decent vocabulary will know what it means - this even before the Spice Girls.

Hooked on phonics works for me!!!

Best Yorkshire (old Norse actually) word is 'THOILE' and not many breeds of Brit can explain it. They think it means mean

In fact you need a whole sentence to explain it - like chagrin or ambiance

It means you CAN afford something and you quite like it, but it isn't value for money or you know the seller bought it a lot cheaper. Like paying the top 20k of a BMW just for the name. Nice car but I just can't thoile it. Cant bring myself to pay that even though I can.

All that in one word.

When I was at school in the 50's we were told not to speak TYKE as it was considered slang. In fact a lot of it is pure Norse and a remnant from the Danelaw.
I can speak tyke with Barnsley coal miners and also do the high finance thing in the city of London with appropriate body language for each. I guess that makes me bilingual. I just have to crack Milwaukee now. I have to speak Glenn Beck at the rifle club and John Wayne at the motorbike club. They have no idea they have a liberal Viking in their midst.

ok I will have to look sharp now it's nearly snap time and I dont want my lug oils clattered - not trying that at the shooting range

One of my favs is the Stoke on trent word - Nesh.... meaning a bit of a wimp in the cold.

For instance, someone says, I'm too cold to go outside someone might respond "don't be so nesh" (actually in full Stokie it would be "Dunna bay sar nesh")

Another phrase that's really good is "over-faced" meaning that moment when you're hungry and a huge pile of food appears and suddenly you don't feel hungry anymore because of the amount of food your presented with.

No! You must embrace the shape of the word...

Oh yes I have a friend from Cheshire who says that

Accent is great for getting rid of drunk beggars when you are at a red light with your window down.
sometimes I feel real mean doing it. but the look of utter confusion on some faces is worth the bad karma.
They know (or think) its English, but they can not make any sense of it,
of course I dig deep for all that lost accent that I once had and chip away at my brain to release the long forgotten dialect.

I have whats left of a liverpudlian accent, I find I try to talk posher to make people understand, but I still do have some of that accent.
so its always odd when people try to imitate me, they always do a RP voice, I guess they hear what they expect to hear.

on the other hand, my nephew who has Aspergers; repeats what I say exactly, and it sound odd. hearing American all the time, I forget that I still have this liverpool accent of sorts and its just so odd to have it said back to me. I used to think he was taking the michael.
It was also funny when he picked up my baby daughters word book (from England), with pictures and words of things like pyjamas, it so happened that the book seemed to pick up on every word that has a diffrent spelling. He threw it on the floor saying it was "full of lies"

My USC wife says she can cope with the accent, it's the different words that lose her. Torch = Flashlight luvvy. Have you got a torch ?
I find American English is pretty standard English with the words. Archaic of course and 'gotten' and 'felony' and 'escrow' etc belongs in 1776 not 2009. Old English lives on here but has evolved in England.

Same in Iceland - old Norse lives on there but modern Danish has evolved.

The emigrants always cling to their roots it seems - and god and guns. The English gave up the old words and the guns and god.

Pity the early Americans couldn't come up with new names for birds like the American robin which is a thrush basically and about as close to a robin as an elephant is to a ferret. They could have called it a Dolly Parton or something.

My dad used to make me read 'May Un Mar Lady' in the Sentinel when we went to visit family. I couldn't understand a bloody word of it.

hahahah there are whole books written in the dialect, I thought them hillarious when I was a kid - I remember the fake author - Arfer Tow-crate... (how to talk right in stokie!)

The May un mar lady comic strip - what a blast from the past!

http://www.thepotteries.org/dialect.html#mar

Na it's not a language. Tyke is a language with different words - not just a strong accent and tortured english words.


Stokies are just laikin at it...

http://www.viking.no/e/england/e-yorkshire_norse.htm

I was able to understand the strip by reading it, if I heard it spoken quickly probably not so much.

As for the Yorkshire words, I've heard 'em used her, more back home then in GA.

There is one word that my mother uses that I've not been able to track down and I can only spell phonetically (from her accent)

gaaaw mund

as in a something outsized, awkward. Don't know where that comes from?