BARNSLEY’S Ian McMillan has welcomed news that the Yorkshire accent has been voted the most trustworthy in the UK.
The Darfield-based poet and Chronicle columnist, whose distinctive voice is well-known throughout the country thanks to his extensive radio work, reckons it’s all to do with the ups and downs of the way folk in the county talk.
After asking 2,221 people, including employers, to listen to 15 British accents, onbuy.com discovered the favourite and most trustworthy was Yorkshire, earning 60 per cent of the vote.
At the other end of the scale was the Brummie accent, deemed to sound the least trustworthy and picked by only four per cent of those polled.
“It’s nice to be trusted, and it means you can get away with a bit more, so it’s helpful when schoolkids are making excuses for not doing their homework,” said Ian.
“I feel a bit sorry for people in Birmingham, whose accent I like personally, but hopefully they’ll see this as a bit of fun.
“It’s interesting when you think that within Yorkshire, there are a whole lot of accents which vary from town to town.
“The way we speak here in Barnsley is quite different to people in the West Riding or even Sheffield, and we even have our own phrases, such as ‘ar yore?’, in other words ‘how are you?’ or ‘reyt’, meaning ‘right’ and which by the time you get to Huddersfield or Bradford, becomes ‘reet’.
“To take it even further, there are some who think there are different accents within Barnsley, with Royston having its own particular version which can be traced back to miners from Staffordshire coming to work there.
“I think what southerners think of as a Yorkshire accent is a cross between Emmerdale and Last of the Summer Wine, but a common theme to all the variations within the county is that, with the exception of when it’s Brian Blessed speaking, the pitch falls at the end of a sentence, whereas with many other accents, such as Brummie, it rises.
“I think that makes it easy on the ear, and perhaps more trusted because of that.”
