Sheffield Dialect: Words, Sayings and Where They Came From
Sheffield talks like nowhere else, though it would rather you didn’t make a fuss about it. The city’s neighbours have a name for the people who live there, built out of the way they say “thee” and “thou”, and some of the words still in use are older than the steel. This is a guide to the Sheffield dialect: the words, where they came from, the people who wrote them down, and what has happened to them since.
Dee-dahs
People from Barnsley, Doncaster, Rotherham and Chesterfield call Sheffielders “dee-dahs”. It comes from the traditional local way of saying the th in “thee” and “thou” as a d: “dee” and “dah”. The pronunciation is still heard, mostly from older people, though it had mostly gone by the time of the Survey of English Dialects.
Thee and thou are themselves part of the story. Across Yorkshire the old singular “you” survives as tha and thee, and is mostly used by men, while “self” turns into sen, so that “yourself” is “tha sen”. Owt and nowt, “anything” and “nothing”, go back to Old English á wiht and né wiht. Summat is something.
The people who wrote it down
Sheffield is unusually lucky in its dialect collectors. The Reverend Joseph Hunter, born in the town, gathered words between about 1790 and 1810 for what became his Hallamshire Glossary, produced between 1828 and 1831. Abel Bywater’s The Sheffield Dialect had a glossary in its 1854 edition. The biggest was Sidney Oldall Addy’s A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield, published in 1888 for the English Dialect Society, which also collected local place names, folklore, games and customs as well. Most of the old meanings below are Addy’s.
The words
Nesh. These days, someone who feels the cold: “Put a coat on, tha’s nesh.” Addy gives it as tender, delicate, soft, from Old English hnesce, and as a verb, to be afraid of something. Of two girls who meant to emigrate, one was heard to say that “when it came t’ point shoo neshed it, but t’ tother’s gone by hersen”. And this being Sheffield, Addy notes that “steel is sometimes said to be nesh when it is not sufficiently hard”.
Mardy. Sulky, moody, in a strop. The Arctic Monkeys put it in a song title and took it national. In 1888 it meant something more specific: “a spoiled child”.
Spice. Sweets, which confuses visitors expecting something hot. Addy has it as “sweetmeats”, and Hunter’s glossary as sweets given to children, with an older sense that took in dried fruit and puddings too.
Mash. To make tea. Addy: “‘To mash the tea,’ i.e., to pour hot water upon the leaves.” The pot is mashing, not brewing.
Snap. The food you take to work. Addy calls it “a light meal” that workmen use of their dinner or tea. And in Sheffield, dinner is in the middle of the day and tea is in the evening.
Jennel (or gennel, or ginnel). A narrow passage between houses, the kind you cut through. Addy spells it gennel, says it’s pronounced “jennel”, and defines it as “an entry, a narrow passage between two or more houses.”
Laik. To play, as in “are tha laikin’ out?” Addy spells it lake and traces it to Old English. It’s used all over Yorkshire.
While. Until. “I’m working nine while five.” It confuses everyone else, and may come from “while-ever”.
Breadcake. A bread roll, not a cob, a bap or a barm. You’ll see it on chip shop menus.
Nah then. Hello, or the opening of a conversation, and sometimes the opening of an argument.
And a few that are going or gone: flit, to move house; fettle, to clean (or, as a noun, condition); sile, to rain hard; chunter, “to grumble, to mutter sullenly”; nobbut, “only, nought but”; and the cornish, which is the mantelpiece. And newcomers soon find themselves called love or duck.
The Old Lad
The dialect has plenty of names for the Devil, and Addy collected them: Old Harry, the Old Lad, the Old One (“t’ owd an”), Old Scrat, and at Eckington “owd Nicker”. He thought Harry came from the Old Icelandic harri, lord, so that “Old Harry” meant “the old lord”, and that the respectful names were left over from a time “as the gods of the heathen became the devils of Christianity”. The Devil gets his own guide: the Devil in the northern landscape.
Where it came from, and where it’s going
Some of the dialect goes back to Old English, as owt and nowt do, and some of it is Norse: many Yorkshire words, like many Yorkshire place names, come from the Scandinavian settlers of the Viking age, the same people behind the -thorpe villages (see Sheffield and Peak place names). Plenty of the older words have fallen out of use or gone, but the everyday ones are still going strong.
From Sheffield to Hellsborough
Hellsborough, the dark-matter Sheffield at the centre of Demonspawn’s fiction and games, still talks broad. Van Hallam, the supernatural hunter at the heart of The Hellsborough Chronicles, tells his stories in it, and in Book One he stops partway through to ask Pip’s age, and says: “They say that the northern vernacular will be dead within a generation, maybe this book can postpone that for a while, ha!” The words Hellsborough has coined for itself are another matter, and the bestiary is full of them, from the boggart up. The surnames the area gave the world are in the guide to Sheffield surnames. Foked is the free solo RPG set in the same world, and for the genre all of it belongs to, start at the dark fantasy and folk horror field guide.
Sources: dee-dahs and the Survey of English Dialects from Wikipedia; tha, thee, sen, owt, nowt, summat, laik and while from Wikipedia; the old meanings of nesh, mardy, spice, mash, snap, gennel, lake, flit, fettle, sile, chunter, nobbut and cornish, and the names for the Devil, from Sidney Oldall Addy’s Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Sheffield (1888); the modern meanings, Hunter, Bywater, breadcake, nah then, and love and duck from Steel City Spiel.
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