Is Lancashire dialect going wambly and reasty? (From Blackpool Citizen)

Is Lancashire dialect going wambly and reasty?

3:30pm Tuesday 3rd November 2009

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LINGUISTS have started an investigation into whether regional dialects are dead or, as they used to say in these parts, just a little “wambly”.

Publisher Collins hopes to trace whether dialect words such as wambly (meaning faint or sick), fratching (to quarrel) and dree (monotonous), once common in Lancashire, are still in use.

Those still in existence will be added to the Collins Corpus, a database of 4.4billion English words used to compile the Collins dictionary.

Darwen-based award-winning dialect poet Jim Atherton said that although he thought dialect was dying out, interest in it was as strong as ever.

He said: “Very few people speak dialect these days and I think it’s because of the movement of the population – people are moving out of the area more, and also coming in.

“There is also a stigma attached to it. People think it’s the language of the gutter.

“A lot of dialect is very specific to industry too, so you’ll have certain words that only miners used, or people on barges. As these industries decline and die out, so does the language.

“I would say the dialect in Lancashire varies every 10 miles and East Lancashire is different to places like Preston and Bolton.

“I address a lot of audiences on Lancashire dialect and people are fascinated by it.

“It is also very widely studied in colleges and universities.”

Collins, working with English local dialect societies, have revealed a list of around 20 words believed to have become extinct during the past 30 years – including wambly, fratching and dree from Lancashire.

People are being asked to send in responses via social networking site Twitter to reveal the last time they heard the word or if it is still in use.

David Britain, from the department of language and linguistics at the University of Essex said: “As we have become more and more mobile, socially and geographically, so local dialect words associated with particular places have been losing out to words with a wider currency.”

Collins want people to Tweet to @localwords of where and when they last heard the word, and who can be potentially identified as its last known user.

>>> Quiz

What are the meanings of these 10 Lancashire words that have fallen out of use?

1 Camping
2 Attercop
3 Agate
4 Bant
5 Baggin
6 Reasty
7 Punce
8 Pinder
9 Hoining
10 Threap

See the answers in the comments below.

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