Good God that is a horrible dialect! It’s spoken in Lancashire, in the north of England. It is in northwestern England, pretty far up, heading up towards Scotland. I just looked at a map and I am not sure if I recognize any cities – maybe Lancaster and Blackpool. It seems like it would be pretty cold up there. There seems to be some Norse influence on the dialect, as with a lot of the dialects in the north of England. If you head south, you start running into an expanding Scouse dialect from Liverpool, which is still very popular among young people.
I think I should be happy for Lancashire because Scouse is one of the worst dialects in all of England. I remember an interview with a boxer from Liverpool. It went on for 10 minutes, and I think I understand 25% of it. It was just awful. Americans who go to live there often never really catch onto the dialect. I remember an American on the Net said that they lived in Liverpool for some time, and after eight years, they still could not understand the young working class women, who had the worst dialects of them all.
Really Manchester dialect is about the same dialect as Lancashire. You can listen to a recording of the hard dialect on Wikipedia. I swear I only got ~80% of it, and that’s not enough for a good conversation, believe me. I would have to see a transcript of the audio to see how many words I missed because a lot of it was just jumbles and I couldn’t even figure out how many words were in there, where one started and the other ended, much less what the words were. I am listening to John Robb, a musician and critic, who was born in Lancashire, and at times, he is maddeningly hard to understand. He is 56 years old, near my age.
Here is an audio of the dialect from a comedian called Johnny Vegas. I have never heard of this actor, and I don’t think I want to listen to his shtick if he talks in that damned dialect.
I listened to it again, and this time I got more of it. I calculated roughly 87% intelligibility, about the same as Swedish and Norwegian. I am sorry, but that is not enough for me. Also anything below 90% qualifies as a foreign language. Vegas is 46, so he is in the older generation. It looks like the pretty hard dialect is being spoken by people 40-over. The dialect is supposedly dying out, and all I have to say is it can’t happen soon enough!
