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In Yorkshire we use loads of glottal stops.
They do in Lancashire too, and various other outlandish parts, as I understand,
but here we're talking Yorkshire. We use them naturally - very often where other
people would use the word "the", and when people imitate the Yorkshire accent -
either for a laugh, or in drama or film, they know there's something they have to do
with those "the"s. Unfortunately, they rarely get it right. In the same way that they rarely
get their "thee"s and "thou"s right either - but that's a different lesson.
Trouble is, that although it comes entirely naturally to us to use glottal stops in
our day to day speech, even native speakers stumble when reading dialect. In fact this
diatribe was prompted by seeing Icabod Theatre's production of "The Calverley Murders". In one scene a group of children recite a rhyme,
in which they appeared to be saying "I'll have thee by tears" "I'll have thee by tears". It took me some time to realise that
what they were aiming for was what is commonly written as "I'll have thee by t'ears". Seeing it so written, the common error
is to attempt to pronounce the "t'". I recall a dialect piece about a football, or perhaps cricket,
match, entitled "t' Match". This is invariably and incorrectly spoken as "tuh Match".
The problem with written dialect is the decision, sometime in the past, to render a glottal stop as
"t'" - things would have gone much better if they were shown with some other indicator - let's say ";;". Now
people would see ;;Match, and know that something special has to be done, but not be tempted to say "t'".
OK, let's get down to it. What is a glottal stop? I'm not a linguist, but simply put it's a momentary, complete closing of the glottis in the back of the throat which stands in place of a more expected consonant.
In fact, a close observation of such stopping in my variety of Yorkshire dialect shows that the stopping
can occur at various points in the mouth, from the glottis across the palate to the back of upper incisors, depending
on the material omitted, and the sound of the preceding letter.
So "I'm getting up" - "Am ge;;in' up" occurs in the glottis, but "Where's the trap?" - "Where's;; trap?" occurs against the incisors.
And now some examples - I've used my theoretical ;; to represent the stop throughout. Notice also, that while
the "t'" representation of glottal stops is usually attached to the following word, the stop actually occurs on the preceding
syllable. For those particularly challenged in articulating the stop, a step in the right direction is to think of a "t" sound
affixed to the preceding word. "It's in the bucket" isn't "It's in t'bucket", but much more "It's int bucket".
1) It's in;; cupboard 
2) Hast getten ;;money?
3) We're goin' to;; shops
4) Av got thi by;; ears
5) He's in;; back
6) When's ;;match?
If you listen to the recordings carefully, I think you will notice that the only time
that there is any sign of a "t" sound is on number 6, and that very fleeting.
However, there are circumstances where "the" does become "t'", as in the last example :-
7) It's in t'owd shed. (t'owd = the old)
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