The presence or absence of any realisation of the definite article in Yorkshire dialects (Letters, 26 May) depends on which part of the county you’re talking about. An article in Leeds Studies in English in 1952 was the first to map the fact that in the local dialect of Hull and surrounding areas there is no definite article at all. A friend who grew up in Hull said that, when learning to read, she was intrigued by this little word “the” that didn’t exist in her speech. She mastered it and learned to use it correctly in writing, and her adult speech featured the standard versions, /ðə/ before a consonant phoneme and /ði/ before a vowel phoneme.
Greg Brooks
Emeritus professor of education, University of Sheffield
• As a Lancastrian, may I say that Yorkie Jeremy Muldowney ’its nail right on th’ead (Letters, 25 April). The conventional use of t’ to represent a northern glottal-stopped definite article in front of a consonant bears no resemblance to the actual sound, irritates many northerners and can be a source of confusion to everyone else.
