August 1 is Yorkshire day and, right on cue, a link to a BBC news item about Yorkshire dialect arrived in a WhatsApp message from my daughter Alice, who lives in Sheffield: New signs drawn up  after council apostrophe error.

The words ‘apostrophe error’ will be familiar to readers of this blog, but where this differs from most stories about punctuation prescriptivism is that the sign concerned was written in Yorkshire dialect. Next to a litter bin, North Yorkshire Council had placed a sign stating ‘gerrit in’t bin’, with a picture of litter discarded in the countryside and underneath, in standard English, ‘or take your litter home, ta’. The phrase ‘gerrit in’t bin’ includes two features of Yorkshire dialect: the spelling of what would be pronounced as a /t/ in RP as ‘r’ and the representation of ‘the’ as the letter ‘t’ with an apostrophe. Pronouncing ‘t’ as /r/ when a vowel follows is a feature of many varieties of English, but pronunciation of ‘the’, whilst not unique to Yorkshire, is perhaps the best known and most stereotypical feature of the dialect.

Why would North Yorkshire Council use a dialect phrase on its bins? Almost certainly to soften the authoritarian message about litter, invoke solidarity and raise a smile. A similar sign from Shetland stating ‘dunna chuck bruck’ appears on the cover of Robert McColl’s 2007 book on Northern and Insular Scots:

My daughter later sent me a photograph of a bin in Sheffield with a similar (though apostrophe-less) slogan ‘purrit int bin’. As the headline suggests, the furore in North Yorkshire was not about the use of dialect per se, but the supposed ‘apostrophe error’.

The BBC article, and a similar one the next day in The Guardian note that the ‘correct’ way to use the apostrophe in this instance would be to write ‘gerrit in t’bin’. But ‘correct’ according to who(m)? North Yorkshire Council’s spokesperson argued that they had seen spellings like ‘in’t bin’ in some dialect dictionaries, but that, on checking with the Yorkshire Dialect Society, they had been told that this was wrong and so had apologised and changed the downloadable versions of the sign. So they had consulted two authorities: dialect dictionaries and a dialect society, and had accepted the judgement of the latter.

The term ‘vernacular norms’ has been used in sociolinguistics since the 1980s, when Lesley Milroy argued that the close-knit networks of traditional working-class communities acted as mechanisms to enforce the norms of the local dialect. More recently, Barbara Johnstone has used the term to demonstrate how, in online forums focussing on local identity, some posters signal their authenticity by ‘feature dropping’, that is, including features of dialect in their posts. However, in these contexts, vernacular norms are enforced in a ‘bottom-up’ way, by the users of the dialect rather than the ‘top-down’ enforcement of norms by authorities.

In the case of the Yorkshire apostrophe, the problem arises because the dialect is written rather than spoken. In Yorkshire dialects (for there are several), the definite article is not pronounced as /t/ but as a glottal stop, or in some cases, not pronounced at all. As far as English grammar is concerned, the definite article goes before the noun, but in Yorkshire pronunciation, a glottal stop comes between ‘in’ and ‘bin’, so, in speech ‘in (glottal stop) bin’ would run together. In the Guardian article, Ian McMillan, aka the Bard of Barnsley, argues that apostrophes are unnecessary here: ‘If I was writing it I would miss the apostrophes out altogether. I would even write it as one word: gerritintbin’.

I’m writing this as several towns and cities in Yorkshire, as elsewhere in England, are clearing up after riots by far-right thugs who would question the right of certain groups to identify as ‘Yorkshire’. A row about apostrophes seems trivial in this context, yet it does raise some important questions about language, identity and authority.

Finally, another date for your diary. According to The Guardian, August 15 is International Apostrophe Day.