LANCASHIRE

LANCASHIRE
1. A north-western county of England.

2. The DIALECT of the county, part of NORTHERN ENGLISH, and related to the CUMBRIAN and GEORDIE dialects to the north, and the YORKSHIRE dialect to the east, while also having features of the MIDLAND dialect area. Some scholars give the town of Rawtenstall as the source of the alliterative 14c poem in North Midland dialect, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Although the Lancashire dialect is particularly associated with the cotton towns of the south-east, such as Burnley, Bolton, and Rochdale, it has many varieties, including the urban dialects of Manchester and Liverpool.

Pronunciation

(1) Lancashire shares many features of pronunciation with other Midland and Northern regions of England, accents ranging from the regional through the RP-influenced to RP. (2) Regional pronunciation is non-rhotic, except for a small and decreasing number of speakers in Rochdale, Accrington, and Preston. (3) Word-initial /h/ tends to be lost in frequently used words such as house and hat. (4) The same vowel /a/ is used for words such as gas and grass, Sam and psalm. (5) There is usually no distinction between the vowels in such words as hoot and hut, which are homophones pronounced /hʊt/. Among RP-influenced speakers, book is often pronounced /bʊk/, a usage that can be considered a SHIBBOLETH of Lancashire speech. (6) The long /u/ vowel is sometimes diphthongized in such words as moon/muən/ and school /skuəl/, especially to the north of Burnley. (7) There is a tendency to use the monophthongs /e, o, ɛ/ in words such as take, soap, square, where RP has diphthongs. (8) In the south, there is a tendency to round the /a/ vowel when it precedes a nasal, particularly /m/ and /n/ in words such as ham/hɒm/ and hand/hɒnd/. (9) Word-initial /l/ as in land and look is often dark, and the /l/ in -ld clusters is often lost, old and cold being realized as ‘owd’ /aud/ and ‘cowd’ /kaud/. (10) In words ending in /ŋ/ a final /g/ is sounded, as in ‘long-g’ /lɔŋg/ for long, ‘sing-ging-g’ for singing. (11) As in WELSH ENGLISH, intervocalic consonants are sometimes lengthened in the south, making chapel sound like ‘chap-pel’ and biting like ‘bite-ting’. (12) In the west, especially around Chorley and Southport, there has been a tendency to add a parasitic nasal after word-final plosives, as in I've hurt my leg -n and They were but lad-ns They were only boys. This feature is rare in the speech of people under 60.

Grammar

(1) There are many workingclass structures such as multiple NEGATION (I haven't done nothing), the use of them as a demonstrative adjective (I don't talk to them people), and the use of non-standard verb forms (I seen, he done). (2) In southern, rural Lancashire, ‘aw’ and ‘(h)oo’ continue to be occasionally used for I and she: see verse below. In the south-east, thou and thee have been traditionally used, as in neighbouring Yorkshire, as a marker of intimacy and solidarity. However, the standard pronouns I, she, you are increasingly being used in all sections of society. (3) There is a tendency to drop the to in infinitive constructions, especially when the first verb ends in a t, as in What d'you want do? (4) The definite article is often reduced to /ɵ/ before both vowels and consonants: see verse below. (5) The negative modal verb maun't (mustn't) is sometimes used in rural areas, but the positive form maun, as used in Scots and in Northern Ireland, is rare. (6) As in many northern areas of Britain, such forms as I've not seen it are more widely used than I haven't seen it. (7) Owt (anything) and nowt (nothing) occur frequently, as in I didn't say owt and He gave us nowt. (8) Right and more recently dead and well are used as colloquial intensifiers, as in We were right/dead lucky and They were well merry (quite drunk).

Vocabulary

Lancashire shares many dialect words with other parts of northern Britain, including elder an udder, freet superstition, fuddle a drinking bout, mither to scold, and oxter an armpit. Items that do not occur elsewhere include alicker vinegar, deggin'-can watering can, judy a girl, kay-fished left-handed, maiden a clothes-horse. However, most of these words are no longer widespread and are used only by old people, comedians, and dialectologists.

Literary Lancashire

The first well-known writer in dialect was John Collier (1708–86), a schoolmaster who lived near Rochdale and wrote under the pen name ‘Tim Bobbin’. The most famous is an admirer of his, Edwin Waugh (pronounced ‘Waff’), the son of a shoe-maker who became a journeyman printer and later a fulltime writer (1817–90). He wrote, among other things, of the oppression of a work system that forced a father to leave home to gain employment. In the following lines, a woman ‘reports’ to her absent husband:When aw put little Sally to bed,
Hoo cried, 'cose her feyther weren't theer,
So aw kiss'd th'little thing, an aw said
Thae'd bring her a ribbin fro' th'fair.
An' aw gav' her her doll, an' some rags,
An' a nice little white cotton-bo';
An aw kiss'd her again, but hoo said
'At hoo wanted to kiss thee an' o.
[thae thou/you, bo' ball, ‘at that, o all]
Like other writers of dialect, Lancashire poets have tended to be obsessed with standard spelling and inclined to use apostrophes freely to mark ‘lost’ letters, some of which were not sounded in STANDARD ENGLISH either (as in kiss'd, above). Organized interest in the dialect centres on the Lancashire Dialect Society, founded in 1951 largely through the efforts of the late G. L. Brook, Professor of English Language at the U. of Manchester. See CUMBRIA, DIALECT IN ENGLAND, MIDLANDS, SCOUSE.