Historically, Yorkshire English traces back to the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, which was spoken north of the Humber estuary. Although pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar can vary, there are several features that are fairly uniform across the Yorkshire varieties. Below are just a few:

• th-fronting

  • The <th> sounds found in words such as thing and father  (known as the voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives)  are pronounced as [f] and [v] in the Yorkshire vernacular. Therefore, words such as fought and thought can become homophonous, that is, they sound identical. Throughout the translation, th-fronting will be represented orthographically through the use of <f> and <v>.

• definite article reduction

  • The word <the> is often reduced to a glottal stop, a sound found in many British pronunciations of the word water. In spelling, an apostrophe is sometimes used to indicate this the 'reduction' of the as a glottal stop (e.g., t' stop 'to the shop'). In many British varieties of English, <t> is pronounced as a glottal stop between two vowels (e.g., water, peter, letter)​. The apostrophe will be used to indicate definite article reduction in the Beowulf translation.

• vocalic differences

  • The vowels are notably different in Yorkshire English. In standard varieties of English, vowels such as <e> and <i> are usually diphthongs, that is, there is a glide-like segment (e.g., a y sound, as in yellow) added to the vowel when pronounced. In the word say, we see the y in spelling, but we also get this y sound in words without the y (e.g., face - pronounced feys - [fejs]). In Yorkshire English, these diphthongs are monophthongs (i.e., there is no y sound).

  • The so-called TRAP-BATH split describes differences in the pronunciation of the <a> vowel in northern and non-northern British English dialects. In Yorkshire English, the vowel in trap is the same as the vowel in bath, which is not true for southern and often more prestigiously viewed varieties of English.   

• dialect words and expressions

  • Yorkshire English is full of words which are not used in other varieties of English. Many of these words go back to earlier parts of the language when Vikings settled in northern parts of England, bringing their own words with them (from a language called Old Norse)​. One such example is lek (modern Norwegian leke 'play') - wanna lek? 'want to play'?