In an interview in the London Magazine in January 1971, Hughes spoke about the impact of his birthplace on his language. Pointing out that he grew up in West Yorkshire, where a very distinctive dialect is spoken, he went on to suggest that one's childhood dialect stays alive in some way, ‘in a sort of inner freedom’. Without his own particular form of speech, he feels he would never have been able to write poetry, adding that West Yorkshire dialect is directly connected to Middle English. This historical connection was to lead him later to translate one of the greatest Middle English poems, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and to write a version of a Greek tragedy for Northern Broadsides, a theatre company that performs classic works in Northern dialect. The rhythms of West Yorkshire speech with its strong oral dialect tradition gave him the impetus to write and sustained him in his writing throughout his life.

Hughes was always preoccupied with patterns of sound. In his first collection, The Hawk in the Rain, his bold use of alliteration, assonance, consonant clusters and compound words gives a physicality to a variety of subjects. In ‘The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar’, the burning is depicted by piling words on words:

The desperate running of a caged wild animal in a zoo in ‘The Jaguar’ is portrayed through the repetitive use of b and s sounds:

In ‘Fallgrief's Girl-Friends’ the man speaks in recognizable Yorkshire: