Pitmatic

Pitmatic (originally: "Pitmatical", colloquially known as "Yakka") is a group of traditional Northern English dialects spoken in rural areas of the Northumberland and Durham Coalfield in England.

The feature distinguishing Pitmatic from other Northumbrian dialects, such as Geordie and Mackem, is its basis in the mining jargon used in local collieries. For example, in Tyneside and Northumberland, Cuddy is a nickname for St. Cuthbert, while in Alnwick Pitmatic, a cuddy is a pit pony. According to the British Library's lead curator of spoken English, writing in 2019, "Locals insist there are significant differences between Geordie and several other local dialects, such as Pitmatic and Mackem. Pitmatic is the dialect of the former mining areas in County Durham and around Ashington to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne, while Mackem is used locally to refer to the dialect of the city of Sunderland and the surrounding urban area of Wearside".

Traditionally, the dialect spoken in Northumberland in rural communities used the Northumbrian burr. This is now very rare. The variety spoken in Durham, while non-rhotic, is traditionally still subject to the Nurse-north merger in words like forst 'first' and bord 'bird', which came about as a result of burr modification.

Dialectology
While Pitmatic was spoken by miners throughout the Great Northern Coalfield from Ashington in Northumberland to Fishburn in County Durham  sources describe its particular use in the Durham collieries. However, Pitmatic is not a homogenous dialect, and varies between and within the two counties. The Durham coalfield is grouped linguistically with Wearside under the 'Central Urban North-Eastern English' dialect region, while the Northumberland coalfield is grouped with Tyneside as part of the 'Northern Urban North-Eastern English' area.

Dictionaries and compilations
Dialect words in Northumberland and Tyneside, including many specific to the coal-mining industry, were collected by Oliver Heslop and published in two volumes in 1892 and 1894 respectively. A dictionary of East Durham Pitmatic spoken in Hetton-le-Hole, compiled by Rev. Francis M. T. Palgrave, was published in 1896. In 2007, Bill Griffiths produced a dictionary where each entry includes information on a word's etymology; it was well reviewed. In an earlier work, Griffiths cited a newspaper of 1873 for the first recorded mention of the term "pitmatical".

Although he did not use the term "Pitmatic", Alexander J. Ellis's survey of the language of "Pitmen", which focused on the region "between rivers Tyne and Wansbeck" and drew on informants from Humshaugh,  Earsdon, and Backworth,  has been studied as an early transcription of Pitmatic. In the 1950s, the Survey of English Dialects included Earsdon as a site and many of the forms recorded matched the transcriptions in Ellis's early work, although some appeared to have modified under pressure from other forms of English.

Harold Orton compiled a corpus (dataset) of dialect forms for 35 locations in Northumberland and northern Durham, known as the Orton Corpus.

Pit Talk in County Durham, an illustrated, 90-page pamphlet by Dave Douglass, a local miner, was published in 1973.

In media
In 2000, Melvyn Bragg presented a programme on BBC Radio 4 about Pitmatic as part of a series on English regional dialects. Pitmatic has rarely featured in film: one of the few cases is in parts of the second episode of Ken Loach's 1975 series Days of Hope, which was filmed around Esh Winning in Durham with mostly local actors.

British comedian Bobby Thompson was famous for his broad Pitmatic accent, and was popular across North East England.

Related forms of English
Other Northern English dialects include:
 * Cumbrian and Northumbrian dialects
 * Geordie (spoken in Tyneside); see also Geordie dialect words
 * Mackem (spoken in Wearside)
 * Smoggie (spoken in Teesside)
 * Yorkshire and Lancashire dialects
 * Scouse (spoken in Merseyside)
 * Mancunian (Spoken in Manchester)