Lancashire dialect and accent
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Lancashire Dialect and Accent refers to the vernacular speech in the historic county of Lancashire excluding that of Liverpool. Simon Elmes' book Talking for Britain said that Lancashire dialect is now much less common than it once was, but it is not yet extinct.
As in all counties, there is a drift within local speech that shifts towards different borders. For example,
- In those parts of Lancashire that border with Yorkshire, similarities with Yorkshire arise. Words are shortened such as with to wi, in to i, etc.
- In north Lancashire, speech sounds more similar to Cumbria. H-dropping is less frequent, and face, space words are said with an /e:/ rather than an /E:/.
- In south Lancashire, speech sounds more similar to the Midlands. There is sometimes a lack of Ng-coalescence so that sing, ring, etc. are said with a hard g.
This shift also occurs in other counties. Therefore, the western parts of Yorkshire have some Lancastrian features such as rhoticity. One would have to be a dialect expert to tell, for example, whether the poet Ted Hughes was from Yorkshire or Lancashire without having known in advance.
Perhaps the most famous Lancashire accent in popular culture is that of Peter Kay, who comes from Bolton. His comedy has parodied several features of Lancashire speech such as definite article reduction and the habit of using one's hands to illustrate what one means. The latter habit is said to originate from the Lancashire mills, where machinery was so loud that mill workers needed to use their hands to communicate. The folk singer/actor Bernard Wrigley is also from Bolton, and has a much "broader" accent than Peter Kay. Films from the early part of the 20th century often contain Lancashire dialect: the film-makers George Formby, Gracie Fields and Frank Randle are notable examples. The 1990s sitcom Dinnerladies used Lancashire accents, and the actress Mina Anwa portrayed the Lancastrian police officer Habeeb in The Thin Blue Line.
The folk song "Poverty Knock" is written to the tune of a Lancashire accent. It is one of the most famous dialect songs in Britain, and describes life in a textile mill. The song "On Ilka Mooar Baht'at" is associated with Yorkshire, but, having been written by natives of Halifax, contains dialect that would be just as typical of Lancashire, including eyt for "eat" and etten for "eaten".
Key features include:
- Definite article reduction. The is shortened to t or glottalled.
- Words such as face, place, space, etc. are usually said with an /E:/ sound. The wait-weight split exists in Lancashire.
- "Oh no", "don't know" sounds are often /o:/, but parts of south Lancashire use /O:/
- Rhoticity is a key feature of a Lancashire accent, and is often more trilled than in the West Country. The closer that one gets to Manchester, rhoticity dies out.
- Vowel-lengthening is common, but generally less so than in Yorkshire. In some words with RP /əʊ/, a sound more like [ɔɪ] may be used, for example, "hole" is pronounced (in IPA) [hɔɪl], "hoil". "There" and "where" rhyme with "here". This lengthening also extends to make "chair" and "cheer" homophones or "stair" and "steer" homophones. In Yorkshire, it is only the there/where pair that are lengthened.
- Words that end -ight often change so that they end -eet. For example light, night, right, sight become leet, neet, reet, seet.
- An oo in words such as book, look, hook can be pronounced with a long sound similar to the ue in R.P. blue.
- A short o is rarley used in Lancashire. It may be lengthened so that "pot" sounds like "pawt" and "posh" sounds like "pawsh". In other case, "open" becomes "oppen", "spoken" becomes "spokken", "broken" becomes "brokken", etc.
- Traditionally, a /t/ was replaced with an /r/; for example, "I'm gerring berrer", "a lorra laughs". This is now confined to the more rural parts of Lancashire. Around Manchester and Salford, a glottal stop is much more common for /t/.
- Merger of the vowels of nurse and square. For example fair and fur can sound exactly the same, in some areas.
- Rather than a mixed use of was and were such as occurs in Standard English, Lancashire dialects tend to only use one of the words and employ it in all cases. The west coast of Lancashire always uses was whilst the rest of the county always uses were.
- Use of a "z" sound for an "s" as in "bus" pronounced "buzz" for example in Darwen or even as far south as Oldham.
- In North Lancashire, words such as "mouth, down, about", etc. have an /a:/ sound: they sound like maath, daan, abaat.
- The Bolton area would say mehth, dehn, abeht.
- The word "self" is reduced to "sen" or "sel", depending on the part of Lancashire.
Several dialect words are also used. Traditional Lancashire dialect often related to the traditional industries of the area, and these words became redundant when those industries disappeared. There are still words that relate to everyday life that are in common use however. See the list of Northshireisms for examples. Words that are popularly associated with Lancashire include "gradely" for excellent and "harping" for talking in a mindless manner. The word "lunch", now in worldwide usage, actually originates from Lancashire. The term "moggy" for a cat, which has become a British national colloquialism, originates from Wigan.
The Survey of English Dialects took recordings from nine sites in Lancashire:
- Cartmel, modern south Cumbria,
- Coniston, modern south Cumbria
- Dolphinholme, near Lancaster
- Eccleston, South Lancashire
- Fleetwood
- Harwood, near Bolton
- Marshside, north of Liverpool
- Read, near Burnley
- Ribchester, between Blackburn and Preston
[edit] References
- "Lancashire English", Fred Holcroft
- "Talking for Britain", Simon Elmes
- Survey of English Dialects. Recording online at http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects
