Lancashire dialect and accent (Lanky) refers to the vernacular speech in Lancashire, one of the counties of England. 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 the county encompassed what are now Greater Manchester, Merseyside and part of Cumbria until 1974, the accents found in these areas are also covered by this article. The historic dialects have received some academic interest, most notably the two-part A grammar of the dialect of the Bolton area by Graham Shorrocks.
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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.[1] Preston, Accrington, Blackburn, Bolton, Chorley, Darwen, Oldham, and Burnley were major cotton mill towns during this time. Blackpool was a major centre for tourism for the inhabitants of Lancashire's mill towns, particularly during wakes week.
The county today comprises a much smaller area as it was subject to a significant boundary reform in 1974,[2] which removed Liverpool and Manchester with most of their surrounding conurbations to form part of the metropolitan counties of Merseyside and Greater Manchester.[3] At this time, the detached Furness Peninsula and Cartmel (Lancashire over the Sands) were made part of Cumbria and Warrington became part of Cheshire. Today the county borders Cumbria, Greater Manchester, Merseyside and North and West Yorkshire.
Within historic Lancashire are dialects belonging to two groups of English dialects: West Midland in the south and Northern in the north. The boundary represented originally the boundary between Mercia and Northumbria and in modern times has tended to move further north. The dialects of south Lancashire have been much affected by the development of large urban areas centred on Liverpool and Manchester.
There is also some evidence of Scandinavian influence - possibly linked to the medieval Norse settlements of West Lancashire and neighbouring Wirral Peninsula in Cheshire. For example - the Lancastrian dialect word 'skrike' (meaning to cry out, to weep or shriek - definition from Crosby (2000)) is found in other places such as Lowland Scotland. Sources link this word to the Old Norse skrika - meaning scream.[4]
The Lancashire Dictionary[5] stated that the Furness (Barrow, Ulverston etc.) had always had more in common with Cumbrian (Cumberland and Westmorland) dialect than with the rest of Lancashire, and so excluded it;[6] with regards to Scouse, the accent is gradually spreading amongst younger people in Merseyside in certain areas. According to Crosby, the "border" between Scouse and Lancashire dialect is loosely estimated between Garswood and Bryn.[6] However, Lancastrian accents are found west of Garswood, most notably in St Helens as shown in the accents of local celebrities and broadcasters such as Johnny Vegas and Ray French. Steven Gerrard from Whiston, Merseyside sounds notably different to Vegas (originally from Thatto Heath). This illustrates that the variation between Scouse and St Helens accents occurs within only a few miles.
As in all counties, there is a drift within local speech that shifts towards different borders. For example,
This shift also occurs in other counties, therefore, some western border areas of Yorkshire have some Lancastrian features such as rhoticity. In most of Lancashire, this sound is pronounced /ʏː/,[7] a sound completely alien to Yorkshire and to Received Pronunciation, but which continues almost identically through Cheshire, Staffordshire, the West Midlands, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire and down into the West Country (as in the German 'ü' "hübsch" /hʏpʃ/ ('pretty') or like the 'u' in the French 'tu'). In general, West Yorkshire speech renders this as /ʊu/.[8]
John C. Wells, one of Britain's most prominent linguists, said in Accents of English Part 2 that a Manchester accent is often nearly identical to an accent from West or South Yorkshire. His proposed test was that Manchester area residents tend to pronounce a final -ng as /ŋɡ/ without any coalescence, whereas Yorkshiremen rarely do this. Also, he suggested that Yorkshiremen are more likely to glottalise a final /d/ on a word (e.g. could and should lose the /d/), and generally turn voiced consonants at the ends of words into voiceless consonants.
Films from the early part of the 20th century often contain Lancashire dialect: the films of George Formby, Gracie Fields and Frank Randle are notable examples.[9] The 1990s sitcom Dinnerladies, written by comedienne Victoria Wood who was brought up near Ramsbottom,[10] used Lancashire accents, and the Accrington actress, Mina Anwar[11] portrayed the Lancastrian police officer Habeeb in The Thin Blue Line.
The band the Lancashire Hotpots originate from St Helens,[12] and popularise dialect in their humorous songs. The folk song "Poverty Knock"[13] is written to the tune of a Lancashire accent and the rhythm of a loom in a Lancashire cotton mill.[14] It is one of the most famous dialect songs in Britain, and describes life in a textile mill. The song "On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at" (On Ilkley Moor without a hat) 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".
| RP English | Lancashire |
|---|---|
| /æ/ as in 'bad' | [a] |
| /ɑː/ as in 'bard' | [aːr] |
| /aʊ/ as in 'house' | [əʏ], [aː] or /aʊ/ |
| /eɪ/ as in 'bay' | [eː] |
| /eə/ as in 'bear' | [ɛr] |
| /aɪ/ as in 'bide' | [ɑː] (South), [aɪ] (North) |
| /əʊ/ as in 'boat' | [oː] |
| /ʌ/ as in 'bud' | [ʊ] |
| /uː/ as in 'boo' | [ʏː] (South) or [uː] (North) |
| /ʊə/ as in 'cure' | [uːər] |
Older dialect has some other vowel shifts: for example, speak would be said with a /eɪ/ sound, to rhyme with R.P. break;[15] words ending in -ought (e.g. brought, thought) would rhyme with oat.[16] These pronunciations are now extremely rare but still used in the Preston area.
It must be noted that for speakers of the Lancashire dialect the accent/dialect from even a neighbouring town is perceived as different as for example Cockney and a Somerset accent. Thus many of those who live in Bury pronounce the town name as Burri yet speakers in some of the neighbouring towns would say Berry. To assume, therefore, that all Lancastrians strongly roll the r (in fact none of them do; that's just a non-rhotic speaker's way of trying to describe rhoticity) as did Gracie Fields (her having a typical Rochdale accent) would be greeted with the same derision as might be visited on those North American actors who assume all English speakers are Cockneys. Older speakers of South Lancashire, for example, could place a person with a remarkable degree of accuracy, with the distinctive accents of Wigan, Bolton, Leigh, Chorley, Westhoughton and Atherton having their own sometimes subtle (but often not) differences in pronunciation.
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, however, words that relate to everyday life that are still in common use. Words that are popularly associated with Lancashire include "gradely" for excellent and "harping (on)" for talking in a mindless manner. The word "lunch", now in worldwide usage, actually originates from Lancashire. The term "moggy" a popular colloquial term for a cat in many parts of the country, means a mouse or insect in many parts of Lancashire, notably in the regions surrounding Wigan and Ormskirk. If older dialect speaking residents of these areas are asked what a 'moggy' is, they will say 'owt smo' an' wick ', i.e. anything small and quick. In the same districts, cheese is often referred to as 'moggy meyght' i.e. 'moggy meat', or in other words, food for mice. Many etymological authorities believe that cats were originally referred to as 'moggy catchers' and the term was abbreviated over time. The word 'maiden' for 'clothes horse' is now used even by people who consider themselves too "proper" to use dialect.
Many poems exist in the dialect, and the Lancashire Society prints such poems regularly. One example of very old-fashioned dialect is the poem Jone o Grinfilt, which was written during the Napoleonic Wars. Another is "The Oldham Weaver", which is dated at around 1815:
(taken from Kirkpatrick Sale, "Rebels Against the Future", p. 45)
Samuel Laycock (1826–1893) was a dialect poet who recorded in verse the vernacular of the Lancashire cotton workers. Another popular 19th Century dialect poet was Edwin Waugh whose most famous poem was "Come whoam to thi childer an' me", written in 1856.[23]
A Lancashire joke is as follows, "A family from Wigan go on holiday to Benidorm and order some food. The father thinking his pie is lacking in gravy calls the waiter over saying " 'ast tha Bisto fort pah?' and the waiter says in a southern English accent, "I'm sorry, mate, I don't speak Spanish."
The Survey of English Dialects took recordings from fourteen sites in Lancashire: