12 Facts About Lancashire dialect

Lancashire dialect or refers to the Northern English vernacular speech of the English county of Lancashire.

Lancashire dialect emerged during the Industrial Revolution as a major commercial and industrial region.

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.

In recent years, some have classified the speech of Manchester as a separate Mancunian Lancashire dialect, but this is a much less established distinction.

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.

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Graham Shorrocks wrote that Lancashire has been the county with the strongest tradition of dialect poetry since the mid-19th century.

Vicinus argued that, after 1870, Lancashire dialect writing declined in quality owing to "cliches and sentimentality".

Linguist Peter Trudgill specified a "Central Lancashire" dialect region, defined particularly by its rhoticity, around Blackburn, Preston and the northern parts of Greater Manchester.

Lancashire dialect 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.

Academic analysis of the corpus of Lancashire dialect writing and poetry has continued into the 21st century.

The collection has been housed at public libraries across Lancashire dialect, and was moved to the University of Bolton Library in 2021.

Lancashire dialect is often used in folk songs that originate from the area.