Do Sheffield kids still say 'thee' and 'thou'?

[TESTPASS]

Yes, Thee and tha is still used where I live.

 

"are tha going darn t firth park"

 

di do do dat doe dont di doe

[eurotour08]

I'm 19 and i say it all't time!

Although sometimes it causes problems; especially abroad with the language barrier, cz even though you can say it right your accent makes you difficult to understand!

Even in the south we couldn't be understood!

[Damkina]

I love hearing the Sheffield accent.

 

Still use it most of the time myself.

 

Really does annoy me when it gets commented on in a snearing way, though.

[Beery]

Anyone who sneers at an accent or dialect is sneering at life itself. Diversity is life and accents and dialects are proof that a language is alive and evolving. Any language without any regional variations may as well be dead. Moving to the USA and learning to distinguish the subtle regional variations there taught me that all accents have value, and it certainly taught me to appreciate the wealth of accents and dialects of the country of my birth.

 

As for the Sheffield accent, it may be no better than any other accent (except perhaps that artificial accent called 'received Pronunciation), but it's certainly no worse than any other accent, and it's my home accent, which gives it a charm that no other accent can ever have: I pity those who disparage it - they are far worse-off for being unable to appreciate it.

[GeoffreyW]

Just a couple of thoughts.

As well as sharing something like the same pronunciation in words like 'bath' & 'castle' (though the quantities are different), Sheffield English used to share the American way of saying 'clerk' & 'Derby' -maybe there are more examples. I suspect these are dying out, like the old way of saying 'bun-fire' & 'kuventre' for Coventry.

Not all that seems ungrammatical in local speech really is. As we've said, 'tha' / thou & thee are just old-fashioned, as are the reflexives ending in -sen: I should think 'missen' comes nearer to medieval usage than standard English 'myself' -it just keeps the oblique case-ending & leaves a few letters out. Similarly the partitive 'us' in 'us books' just derives differently from 'our', but just as genuinely from Anglo-Saxon. 'Dun't' = 'doth not' (pronounced 'duth not'), though 'i'n't' can't really be excused in the same way. I haven't heard 'moun' for a while, but in all cases apart from 2nd & 3rd persons singular, it's more correct in derivation than standard 'must'; similarly 'were / war' instead of 'was'.

Finally, as a Sheffielder who went away & returned, I can say I really knew I was back when an elderly lady ('an owd lass') addressed me as 'mester'. The funny thing about this typical Sheffield word is that it's not so much old English as old French ('maistre'). But that's another story.

 

Geoffrey.

[IluvStaffys]

I speak yorkshire twang ault time most of my mates thee n thow. I can remember my dad always tellin me to stop theeing n thowin. Well tha does it dad i'd say )

[JohnM]

Kid is no way an Americanism. When I wor a lad (OK then, a kid) in the very late 40s and all through the 50s, almost everybody's brother (especially, dare I say, in more working class families than ours) was known by his sibling(s) as 'our kid.' I was brung in in Donny, where it was certainly used, but from memory it was even more prevalent in Leeds, where I often visited.

 

I'm from Lancashire originally and I was always quite surprised by the use of "kid" in Sheffield for people a lot older than youngsters eg "this kid I know..." could refer to someone in their 30s...