Listen to the farmer speak in this video. Does this particular accent still exist in parts of Yorkshire, or has it made way completely for accents closer to the postman’s, what we’d understand as a “Yorkshire accent” today? I have to admit, if nobody had told me he was from Yorkshire before listening to the video, I’d have had a hard time placing where he was from, despite having grown up in the north (albeit, on the right side of the Pennines): “aboot”, “grand-fourks”?
I’m originally from the SW Durham Dales and the dialects of that area bear some resemblance to that in the video (though not exact by any means). I lived in a market town and on a Wednesday the farmers would descend for the livestock auctions and the pubs would be filled with many and varied accents, some very particular and idiosyncratic. I suspect that is what this chap has.
The dales of my youth had a grand old mix of Geordie, Yorkshire and Cumbrian and varied wildly over very short distances but a lot of them used the same words that this he does, and yes, the scandanavian influence is ever-present. (“force” meaning waterfall, “bairn” meaning child etc)
I spent a lot of my childhood in the Vale of York, not the Dales, but I’d recognise this as a Yorkshire accent and recognise many if not most of the words he uses. As for the Nordic link, having just been in Finland, it’s interesting to hear “teem” (which we still use to mean pour, like “it’s teeming down with rain”) pronounced with two distinct vowel sounds instead of one pure long e as most of us I think would use today. Pronouncing the vowels separately is what Finnish does, as far as I could grasp.
I still come across plenty of farmers who speak very similarly to the one in the video, albeit usually not quite as wooden as that fella! He sounds to me like a bloke reading from a script without rehearsal, although it’s beside the point.
Generally speaking, urbanites seem to have less prominent accents/dialects than those in rural areas, at least in this part of the country. Notable exceptions include Leeds and Birmingham.