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Northern English vernacular native to Lancashire From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.
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Lancashire dialect | |
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Native to | England |
Region | Lancashire |
Ethnicity | English |
Indo-European
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Early forms | Old English
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Dialects | Different varieties within the dialects, traditionally divided between the South Lancashire dialect (part of the Northwest Midlands group) on the one hand, and the North Lancashire dialect (of the Northern group) on the other. |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | – |
Glottolog | lanc1236 |
IETF | en-u-sd-gblan |
Lancashire within England, showing ancient extent | |
Coordinates: 53°48′0″N 2°36′0″W | |
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] 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,[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 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.[4] 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.[5]
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.[6] 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.[6]
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.[7]
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Lancashire uses rhotic pronunciation.[8]
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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).[9]
Ellis often spoke of "the Lancashire U" in his work.[10] This was similar to the ʊ in other Northern and North Midland dialects but was actually a more centralised ʊ̈. 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[11] | ɐʏ in MOUTH words. ɪŋk 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[12] | eː in FACE words. ʊə in GOAT words, although ɔɪ occurs in words such as "coal" and "hole". ɛɪ 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, 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[13] | aʊ in MOUTH words. ɑɪ in PRICE words. | Abbeystead, Blackpool, Garstang, Goosnargh, Kirkham, Poulton-le-Fylde, Preston, Wyresdale | Isle of Man |
31 | West Northern[14] | 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 Yorkshire |
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.
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.
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.[17]
The fieldworkers for the sites were Stanley Ellis and Peter Wright.[18] The latter was a native of Fleetwood and wrote his PhD on the dialect, using his father as the principal informant.[19] 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.[20]
The table below shows the sites as reported in Book 1 of the Survey's outputs for the northern counties.[21]
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.[22]
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.[23]
John C. Wells, who grew up in Up Holland,[24][25] made some passing comments on Lancastrian speech (mostly on the southern parts of the county) in his 1982 series of books, Accents of English.
The linguist Peter Trudgill specified a "Central Lancashire" dialect region, defined particularly by its rhoticity, around Blackburn, Preston and the northern parts of Greater Manchester. He classified the county of Merseyside, excluding the St Helens borough and Southport as another dialect region, grouped most of Greater Manchester in the "Northwest Midlands" region, and grouped the non-rhotic northern parts of Lancashire in with Cumbria and most of Yorkshire in the "Central North" region.[35]
In 2005 and 2006,[36] the BBC, working with the University of Leeds, undertook a survey of the speech of the country.[37] The recordings are now available on the British Library's website.[38] An accompanying book, Talking for Britain: a journey through the voices of a nation, was published in 2005; the author noted that the speech of Lancashire in 2005 differed markedly from "the impenetrable tracts of rural Lancastrian that the Survey of English Dialects found in the 1950s".[39]
Academic analysis of the corpus of Lancashire dialect writing and poetry has continued into the 21st century. Areas of research include identifying the syntax of the dialect,[40][41][42] methods of oral performance,[43][44] the lexicography of dialect words,[45] and the relationship between dialect and social class in the United Kingdom.[46][47]
Graham Shorrocks wrote that Lancashire has been the county with the strongest tradition of dialect poetry since the mid-19th century.[48] Many of these gave commentaries on the poverty of the working class at the time and occasional political sentiments: for example, the ballad Jone o Grinfilt portrayed an unemployed handloom worker who would rather die as a soldier in a foreign war than starve at home.[49] Vicinus argued that, after 1870, dialect writing declined in quality owing to "clichés and sentimentality".[50] Writing in 1999, Shorrocks argues that "Many dialect writers nowadays cannot speak dialect, or cannot speak it in any convincing fashion, and much of what is written seems exhausted, poor, and, crucially, detached from living speech.[51] Lancashire dialect writing, at least in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, often drew on Lancashire folklore.
The Lancashire Authors Association was founded in 1909 and still exists for writers in the dialect, producing an annual paper called The Record.[51]
Some dialect poets include:
Dialect poets have occasionally appeared on the BBC since its establishment. Sam Smith featured on the radio in the 1920s.[56] In the 2010s, BBC radio programmes analysed the Manchester Ballads (which featured dialect)[57] and reported on contemporary poets that kept the tradition of dialect poetry alive.[58][59]
In April 2011, Pendle Borough Council printed phrases from local dialect poems on stone-cube artworks in the area.[60]
In November 2016, Simon Rennie from Exeter University announced his collection of Lancashire dialect poetry from the time of the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861–65.[61] He said, "It's fascinating how people turned to and used poetry, in their local languages, to express the impact events so far away were having on them."[61]
The Lancashire Dialect Society was founded in 1951; The Journal of the Lancashire Dialect Society has included articles on the Survey of English Dialects and on the dialects of Germany, Switzerland and the United States.[62] The society collected a library of publications relating to dialect studies which was kept at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester from 1974 onwards.[63] This collection was afterwards taken away and deposited at the Lancashire County Library in Preston.
The Lancashire Authors' Association is devoted to the study of Lancashire literature, history, traditions and dialect.[64] The Association’s library collection was founded in Horwich in 1921 and contains dialect works by authors including Edwin Waugh, Samuel Laycock and Teddy Ashton. The collection has been housed at public libraries across Lancashire, and was moved to the University of Bolton Library in 2021.[65]
Various newspapers in Lancashire and the magazine Lancashire Life have included content relating to the Lancashire dialect. R. G. Shepherd contributed many articles interesting both for their philosophy and their excursions into local dialect to The West Lancashire Gazette and The Fleetwood Chronicle. Dialect has also featured in The Bolton Journal, The Leigh Reporter and The Lancashire Evening Post as well as in "Mr. Manchester's diary" in The Manchester Evening News.[66]
Between 1979 and 2015, the North West Sound Archive contained a range of records in Lancashire dialect (as well as Cumberland and Westmorland dialect). The Archive closed owing to financial reasons in 2015, and its materials were relocated to the Manchester Central Library, Liverpool Central Library, and the Lancashire Archives.[67]
Films from the early part of the 20th century, particularly those produced by Mancunian Films, often contain Lancashire dialect: the films of George Formby, Gracie Fields and Frank Randle are some examples.[68]
The 2018 film Peterloo used reconstructed Lancashire dialect from the early 19th century, based on the works of Samuel Bamford, who was portrayed in the film.[69]
Similarly, in music, the Lancashire dialect is often used in regional folk songs. The folk song "Poverty Knock"[70] is one of the best-known songs of such nature, describing life in a Lancashire cotton mill.[71] The Houghton Weavers is a band formed in 1975 that continues to sing in Lancashire dialect.[72] In 1979, the Houghton Weavers presented a series on local folk music on BBC North West entitled Sit thi deawn.[73]
The band the Lancashire Hotpots, from St Helens, have also used the Lancashire dialect in their work, particularly for humor.[74]
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