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Definite article reduction ( DAR), in linguistics, is the use of a vowel-less form of the definite article the in Northern dialects of English English, for example in Yorkshire dialect. DAR is often represented by dialect spelling with an apostrophe: or .
DAR is found in most traditional Northern English varieties and even some North Midlands dialects; however, the dialects of Northumberland, northern County Durham and northern Cumberland are not affected by DAR.
A similar usage of an article with a consonant "t'" can also be found in Modern Dutch and in the West Frisian language off the north Netherlands coast. In these languages, "t" clearly derives from the neuter definite article (Dutch het and West Frisian it) because the Dutch and Frisian masculine and feminine singular as well as plural definite article de cannot become "t").
The family name "Huis in't Feld" exists in Dutch, meaning "house in the field". Claims of that being phonetically similar to DAR remain to be verified experimentally. In Cumbria, a voiceless alveolar plosive (the English t sound) occurs and may have some superficial similarities to realizations in West Frisian and Low German, but the glottal and the glottalised DAR variants that are found elsewhere in the DAR area and across Yorkshire present a very different realisation. Jones (2002: 342) comments that no contact explanation with other varieties of Germanic is required (or could be supported on the basis of available evidence) to explain DAR as the development of DAR involves common cross-linguistic patterns of change (stopping of dental fricatives, change of plosive to glottal) that occur in unrelated languages and so they have a purely phonetic origin.
Speakers of other forms of English often find it difficult to hear, especially the 'glottal' forms that affect the pitch and duration and voice quality of surrounding words and sounds in subtle ways. This often leads to claims that the article is absent, but this is rarely the case. True absence of the article may occur in the east of the DAR area, in and around Kingston upon Hull.
Instrumental acoustic work in 2007 showed that DAR speakers use very subtle differences in the quality and timing of glottalisation to differentiate between a glottal stop occurring as an allophone of final /t/ in a word like "seat" and a glottal stop occurring as the form of the definite article in otherwise identical sentences (compare "seat sacks" and "see t' sacks"). Speakers of DAR dialects therefore appear to have (put somewhat simplistically) two kinds of glottal stop: one for DAR and one for word-final /t/.
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