Lancashire Dialect and Accent - Poetry and Other Literature

Poetry and Other Literature

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:

Oi'm a poor cotton-weyver, as mony a one knoowas*,

Oi've nout for t'year, an' oi've word eawt my clooas,

Yo'ad hardly gi' tuppence for aw as oi've on,

My clogs are both brosten, an stuckings oi've none,

Yu'd think it wur hard,

To be browt into th' warld,

To be clemmed, an' do th' best as yo' con.

(taken from Kirkpatrick Sale, "Rebels Against the Future", p. 45)

• The word knoowas may have just been used to force a rhyme with clooas. The Oldham area has traditionally pronounced the words knows as knaws. Alternatively it could be a dialect rendering of the word knowest.

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.