Ee bah gum! Asylum seekers learn to ‘speak Yorkshire’
“EY UP, duck” is not a phrase familiar to the people of Jordan, Iran or Syria.
Yet for asylum seekers taking English lessons in Bradford, learning how to “speak Yorkshire” is the greatest challenge to bridging the culture divide.
Forster College, which is part of Bradford College, is running 12-week dialect courses for mature students “to improve their spoken English”.
“Ey up”, “ta love”, “I’m off t’shops”, and “flippin’ ’eck”, are just some of the words and phrases that are taught to help them understand everyday conversations and to feel like they fit in with the local community.
Chris Baillie, manager at Forster College, said she started the courses last June after students said they wanted to continue learning over the summer.
“Students would go out in the city and would come back and ask, ‘what does ta love mean?’ They were coming here with such limited English but in Bradford, it’s a different animal!”
The students hail from countries all over Africa, the Middle East and Europe and, Ms Baillie said, help form part of the multicultural “melting pot” for which the West Yorkshire town is renowned. Many of them are asylum
Feather in her cap
seekers and attend weekly classes with up to 15 people.
“The classes are fun,” said Ahmad Maaitah, a 52-year-old lawyer from Jordan, who has been in the UK for a year.
“I learned phrases like ‘ta’, and ‘ey up’, ‘owt’ and ‘nowt’. I like them,” he added, laughing. “What becomes ‘wha’ when in conversation.”
Mr Maaitah said that his new skills were useful on a trip to London, when he was chatting with a local.
“The guy said that he went to Manchester University and he didn’t understand northern accents. So I spoke more English than them because the accent is so different.” dialect
‘Students would go out in the city, come back and ask “what does ta love mean?”’