The Lancashire dialect (or colloquially, Lanky) refers to the Northern English vernacular speech of the English county of Lancashire. The region is notable for its tradition of poetry written in the dialect.
Scope of Lancashire dialect
Lancashire emerged during the Industrial Revolution as a major commercial and industrial region. The county encompassed several hundred mill towns and collieries and by the 1830s, approximately 85% of all cotton manufactured worldwide was processed in Lancashire. It was during this period that most writing in and about the dialect took place, when Lancashire covered a much larger area than it does today (at least from an administrative point of view—the historic county boundary remains unchanged). The administrative county was subject to significant boundary changes in 1974,George, D. (1991) Lancashire which removed Liverpool and Manchester with most of their surrounding conurbations to form part of the metropolitan counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester.Local Government Act 1972. 1972, c. 70 At this time, the detached Furness Peninsula and Cartmel (Lancashire over the Sands) were made part of Cumbria, and the Warrington and Widnes areas became part of Cheshire.
The linguist Gerard Knowles noted that Lancashire dialect was still spoken in the city of Liverpool in 1830, before the period of mass immigration from Ireland that led the dialect of the city to change radically. Modern Liverpool speech is usually treated as a separate dialect, named Scouse. In the post-war era, migration to other towns in Merseyside, and also to the new towns created at Runcorn, Skelmersdale and Warrington, has led to an expansion in the area in which Scouse is spoken, as the next generation acquired Scouse speech habits that often displaced the traditional Lancashire or Cheshire dialects of the area.
The area transferred in 1974 to modern Cumbria, known as "Lancashire over the sands", is sometimes also covered as in scope of Cumbrian dialect: for example, The Cumbrian Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore was written by the Barrovian William Robinson and included this area. As there was mass migration in the 19th century to Barrow-in-Furness from Ireland, Staffordshire, the Black Country, Scotland and nearby rural areas, it has (like Liverpool) developed a dialect different from the surrounding rural area.
In recent years, some have also classified the speech of Manchester as a separate Mancunian dialect, but this is a much less established distinction. Many of the dialect writers and poets in the 19th and early 20th century were from Manchester and surrounding towns.
Pronunciation
The Lancashire dialect traditionally used rhotic pronunciation, but the accents of much of the area have become non-rhotic since the middle of the 20th century.Set out below in the Modern Research section
Grammar
History and research Dialect division in the 19th century Alexander John Ellis, one of the first to apply phonetics to English speech, divided the county of Lancashire into four areas. Three of these four were considered North Midland in his categorisation of dialects, whereas the fourth (mostly the section that is in modern Cumbria, known as "Lancashire over the sands") was considered Northern. Dialect isoglosses in England seldom correspond to county boundaries, and an area of Lancashire could have a dialect more similar to an area of a neighbouring county than to a distant area of Lancashire.
Ellis expressly excluded the Scouse dialect of Liverpool from the areas below, although his Area 22 included some sites in modern Merseyside (e.g. Newton-le-Willows, Prescot).
Ellis often spoke of "the Lancashire U" in his work. This was similar to the in other Northern and North Midland dialects but was actually a more centralised . In addition, the dialects he studied were all rhotic at the time of writing.
Dialect area number Dialect area name Distinctive characteristics Sites in Lancashire Areas of other counties in same dialect area 21 Southern North Midland in MOUTH words. for the present participle. Bury, Failsworth, Manchester, Moston, Oldham, Patricroft, Royton, Rochdale, Stalybridge Parts of north-east Cheshire and north-west Derbyshire 22 Western North Midland in FACE words. in GOAT words, although occurs in words such as "coal" and "hole". in some FLEECE words (e.g. "speak"). Blackburn, Bolton, Burnley, Clitheroe, Colne Valley, Earlestown, Farington, Halliwell, Haslingden, Higham, Hoddlesden, Leigh, Leyland, Mellor, Newton-le-Willows, Ormskirk, Penwortham, Prescot, Sabden, Samlesbury, Skelmersdale, St Helens, Walton-le-Dale, Warrington, Westhoughton, Whalley, Wigan, Worsthorne None. Ellis said that he considered including the Yorkshire sites of Halifax, Huddersfield, Marsden and Saddleworth in this area, but decided to include them in area 24 instead. 23 Northern North Midland in MOUTH words. in PRICE words. Abbeystead, Blackpool, Garstang, Goosnargh, Kirkham, Poulton-le-Fylde, Preston, Wyresdale Isle of Man 31 West Northern ia in FACE words. eɪ in FLEECE words. aɪ in PRICE words. iʊ in GOOSE words. ʊu in MOUTH words. Broughton-in-Furness, Cark-in-Cartmel, Caton, Cockerham, Coniston, Dalton, Heysham, High Nibthwaite, Hornby, Lancaster, Lower Holker, Morecambe, Newton-in-Furness, Quernmore, Skerton, Ulverston All of Westmorland, south and central Cumberland, south Durham and northwest YorkshireEllis was writing before the lexical sets devised by John C. Wells, but these sets are used here for comparisons with other articles on Wikipedia. Ellis's equivalent was a system of letters as represented in early West Saxon speech.
Dialect glossaries A number of dialect glossaries were published in the 18th and 19th Centuries, often by philologists who were interested in the old words retained in certain dialects.
Glossary of provincial words used in the neighbourhood of Ashton-under-Lyne, Mr. Barnes, 1846. Glossary of provincial words used in the neighbourhood of Ormskirk, W Hawkstead Talbot, 1846. The Dialect of South Lancashire, or Tom Bobbin's Tummus and Meary; with his rhymes and an enlarged glossary of words and phrases, chiefly used by the rural population of the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, Samuel Bamford, 1854. A Glossary of the Dialect of the Hundred of Lonsdale, North and South of the Sands, in the County of Lancaster; together with an essay on some leading characteristics of the dialects spoken in the six northern counties of England (ancient Northumbria), JC Atkinson, 1869. A Glossary of the Words and Phrases of Furness (North Lancashire), RB Peacock, London Phil. Soc. Trans., 1869. A Glossary of Rochdale-with-Rossendale Words and Phrases, H Cunliffe, 1886. A Blegburn Dickshonary, J Baron, 1891. A Grammar Of The Dialect Of Adlington (Lancashire), Karl Andrew Hargreaves, 1904. A Grammar Of The Dialect Of Oldham (Lancashire), Karl Georg Schilling, 1906.
Of these, only the works on Oldham and Adlington contain any phonetic notation, and this was in a slightly different code to the modern IPA.
Dialect Reference Short vowels Long vowels Diphthongs Triphthongs Adlington Hargreaves, 1904 a ɑ e ɪ ɔ ʊ o ə aː ɑ: eː ɛː iː ɔ: uː oː əː aɪː aːe eiː iːə ʊə ɔɪː ɔʊː uɪ ʊiː aɪə Oldham Schilling, 1906 a e ɪ ɔ ʊ o ə aː eː iː ɔ: uː oː ɜː aɪ eɪ ɪə aʊ ʊə ɛʊ ɛə ɔɪ ɔə uɪ ɪɛ A late-19th-century largely derivative attempt to document the dialect county-wide was A Glossary of the Lancashire Dialect (1875), produced under the Manchester Literary Club. The editors, John H. Nodal and George Milner, noted substantial variation between northern and southern Lancashire and the difficulty of drawing a precise boundary. They aimed to represent pronunciation with a consistent spelling approach and used “Glossic” symbols for pronunciation.
Survey of English Dialects and related research Led by Harold Orton at the University of Leeds, the Survey of English Dialects surveyed 313 sites across England, the Isle of Man and some bordering areas of Wales in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Survey recorded the dialect used in fourteen sites in Lancashire. These sites were mostly rural. A second phase, researching more urban areas, had been planned from the outset but financial problems meant that this second phase never occurred and the Survey's coverage was mostly confined to rural parts of England.
The fieldworkers for the sites were Stanley Ellis and Peter Wright. The latter was a native of Fleetwood and wrote his PhD on the dialect, using his father as the principal informant. In 1981, Wright published a book The Lanky Twang: How it is spoke that explained the dialects of Lancashire through a series of illustrations, often humorous.
The table below shows the sites as reported in Book 1 of the Survey's outputs for the northern counties. Code Site Date survey administered Number of informants Fieldworker Tape recording made La13 Bickerstaffe, west Lancashire 28 June – 1 July 1955 2 Stanley Ellis No La2 Cartmel, modern south Cumbria 28 May – 6 June 1954 3 Stanley Ellis Yes, not survey respondent La1 Coniston, modern south Cumbria 20–25 April 1955 2 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La4 Dolphinholme, near Lancaster 21–25 May 1954 3 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La11 Eccleston, near Chorley 23–26 March 1954 3 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La5 Fleetwood 1954 intermittently 4 Peter Wright Yes, survey respondent La14 Halewood, near Liverpool 29 March – 3 April 1954 3 Stanley Ellis No La12 Harwood, near Bolton 16–23 February 1954 2 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La10 Marshside, Southport 8–13 April 1954 4 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La6 Pilling, Fylde coast 24–29 January 1952 3 Peter Wright No La9 Read, near Burnley 3–7 March 1954 2 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La8 Ribchester, between Blackburn and Preston 11–17 March 1954 4 Stanley Ellis Yes, survey respondent La7 Thistleton, on the Fylde near Blackpool 19–23 January 1952 4 Peter Wright No La3 Yealand, near Lancaster 20–25 April 1955 2 Stanley Ellis No
There were several other monographs written by dialectologists by Harold Orton's department at the University of Leeds, including some urban areas such as Bury, Middleton, St. Helens and Southport. These are now contained in the Archive of Vernacular Culture at the Brotherton Library in Leeds.
The site of Harwood (La12) was later included in the UNESCO-funded Atlas Linguarum Europae. The results of this survey have attracted little attention.
Modern research Bolton area Graham Shorrocks, a linguist from Farnworth, conducted a series of research projects on the dialect of the Bolton area. These were consolidated into two linked books named A Grammar of the Dialect of the Bolton Area, published in 1998 and 1999.
In addition, the Harwood area of Bolton, which had been a site in the Survey of English Dialects, was made into a site for the Europe-wide linguistic project Atlas Linguarum Europae.
John C. Wells, who grew up in Up Holland, made some passing comments on Lancastrian speech (mostly on the southern parts of the county) in his 1982 series of books, Accents of English. In central Lancashire, words such as coal and hole are pronounced with the vowel, giving and . In southern parts of Lancashire such as the Bolton and Oldham areas, the MOUTH vowel is or . This can be heard clearly in the pronunciation of the word 'roundabout' in these areas. In much of the area around Manchester, the GOOSE vowel is fronted . The lexical sets for NURSE and SQUARE are both realised with the same vowel . This is known as the square–nurse merger, although (as in most of the North of England) many NURSE words are pronounced with a short schwa so that curse is pronounced in non-rhotic areas. The final vowel in words such as happy and city is a short rather than the of most other English dialects. The word one is usually pronounced rather than the of Received Pronunciation or the in other parts of Northern England.