The following is a copy of the Press release relating to the latest publication of John's excellent book. Further information can be obtained by logging on to his website or by e-mail..

Yorkshire Dialect by John Waddington-Feather. (New edition by Feather Books) 100 pp. Pbk. ISBN: 1 84175 107 3. £6.99
 
In the first part of his book, Mr Waddington-Feather shows how Yorkshire dialect and other English dialects came to England and developed, and how standard English has evolved from them.
 
In the second part of his book he has collected a wide range of Yorkshire dialect literature from a long tradition, which goes back to the 7th century Whitby poet Caedmon. There are samples of poetry from all parts of Yorkshire and from all ages to the present.
 
The author grew up in a dialect speaking community, later graduating at Leeds University, where he studied under the late Professor Harold Orton, who pioneered so much dialect study in Britain and the States.
 
John Waddington-Feather is perhaps better known for his plays and novels, which have a strong regional flavour. His verse-play Garlic Lane, set in Keighley in the 1950s, won the national Burton Award in 1999 after being produced and recorded at Bingley Little Theatre. It was first produced at Leeds Civic Theatre in 1972. His play, The Lollipop Man, is to be produced in Ilkley this autumn.
 

He is a Life Member of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, of which he is a former secretary and editor. He is also a Life Member of the Bronte Society and is currently chairman of the J.B.Priestley Society.

 

 

Charlotte in Kentucky.

I've had some interesting requests concerning Yorkshire dialect, or more particularly my brand of it, the kind they used to speak round Keighley when I was a lad. I say used to for no longer do they speak the same kind I did - and still do on occasions. I was visiting Haworth two or three years ago and called in at the Black Bull for a bar snack. The pub was very busy and I said to the lad who was serving, "Tha'rt throng toneet." He looked at me blankly and said, "Pardon?" He'd clearly no idea what I'd said, though he was local and spoke with a local accent. I translated. "I said you're very busy tonight." "Oh…yes," he replied and scurried off after giving me an odd look. I'm sure he thought I was foreign. So much for the Brontë sisters' dialect, used to such effect in their novels. It's no longer spoken in Haworth, it seems.

But that is the nature of language. It changes each generation to a greater or lesser extent. More interesting were the requests for my wedding blessings in Yorkshire dialect: one last year and one this. One even made the BBC on John Peel's programme and the other was used at a wedding in California. And it was from America I received a request from an American actress for some help in pronouncing the dialect found in Charlotte and Emily's novels.

An American playwright, William Luce, has written a play entitled simply, "Charlotte" and it was being staged this January in Kentucky - at a restaurant called The Backstage Café. I was intrigued. The actress who approached me was called Laura Gurry and she was taking the lead as Charlotte Brontë. I never spoke to the lady but she e-mailed me several times requesting recorded examples of the Haworth dialect as spoken at the time the novels were written. It hadn't altered all that much from the sisters' era to mine, a range of just over a century. I'm past my three score and ten and was brought up speaking dialect with older relatives at Silsden and a farmer great-uncle at Denholme, just over the hill from Haworth. The generations before me spoke it all the time as a matter of course. Not only artisans but even people we would classify as being in the professional classes. Exactly as they do in "Shirley."

So I sent Laura Gurry a copy of my "Yorkshire Dialect" which contains a history of our dialects and examples of Yorkshire dialect writings across the county, including some from Keighley. I also recorded her the old Joseph dialect extracts in "Wuthering Heights" and the snatches of dialect in "Shirley."

I received by way of exchange some very interesting Shaker histories and hymns from Kentucky, where a colony of Shakers settled around the time of the Brontës, many of them coming from just over the border in Lancashire. How the performance went I never found out despite several e-mails and letters, but if you'd been around Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on January 17th 2004, you could have called in at the Backstage Café, 109 North Mulberry Street when the doors were open at 6.45 pm. Dinner was served promptly at 7 pm and the performance of "Charlotte" started at 8 pm. And I wonder what Charlotte would have made of all that - Haworth dialect á l'American and all!


John Waddington-Feather ©