Yacker also used outside the Industrial Areas
The word is used much further south on the North East Coast of Yorkshire. In the fishing days there was intense rivalry amongst the villages. A Hinderwell jibe directed at Staithes was
Stee-as Yackers, flither pickers, ‘errin’ guts fer garters.
Just recently I heard from James whose mother was born in miners’ cottages at Boulby. She had moved with her family to Kinsley just north of Doncaster about 1925 but she remembered a rhyme from her childhood
Stee-as yackers agen the wall. A bucket’o’watter’d droon ‘em all.
Now those of you who watched the BBC2 series Balderdash & Piffle will know proper linguists (like Wor Bill from Durham & Tyneside for example ) will only date a word from it first appearing in print. However James’ report does suggest ‘yacker’ was known on the NE Yorkshire coast in the 1920s. Mike Park the secretary of the Yorkshire Dialect Society lives in Scarborough and, to the best of his knowledge, it is unknown there. He also kindly checked Prof Widdowson’s list of dialect words of Filey and it was not there either. My mate, Mike, from Fearby near Masham did not know it until he moved up to Teesside so it does not seem to extend far into Yorkshire. It is still possible the word originates in NE coalfield from where it migrated to the North East Yorkshire coast because many sailors from the North Yorkshire fishing villages manned the colliers which transported coal out of the Tyne. (James Cook learnt his craft on a Whitby coal boat.) Also there were age old trading links between Tyneside and North East Yorkshire. North Yorkshire alum was combined with urine brought down in barrels from Newcastle to create a fixative for dyes.(no..I'm not taking the p...!)
However this also raises the possibility that the word could have travelled to other way..from North East Yorkshire to Durham/Northumberland.
It may be connected with yack meaning to talk to ‘chatter’. David Simpson found an entry in a Scots dictionary yack to talk roughly. You can see how ‘townies’ would hear miners’ or farmers’ speech as ‘yacking’. There is also the Australian word yakka meaning very hard work but it’s difficult to see how this connects. As is the case of so many other dialect words we may never know.
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