Whilst clearly spoken with a Northern English accent, the Cumbrian dialect shares much vocabulary with Scots.
These people would have spoken Brythonic, which developed into Old Welsh, but around the 5th century AD, when Cumbria was the centre of the kingdom of Rheged, the language spoken in northern England and southern Scotland from Lancashire and Yorkshire to Strathclyde had developed into a dialect of Brythonic known as Cumbric (the scarcity of linguistic evidence, however, means that Cumbric's distinctness from Old Welsh is more deduced than proven).
Remnants of Brythonic and Cumbric are most often seen in place names, in elements such as caer 'fort' as in Carlisle, pen 'hill' as in Penrith, glinn 'valley' and redïn 'ferns, bracken' as in Glenridding, and craig 'crag, rock' as in High Crag.
The most well known Celtic element in Cumbrian dialect is the sheep counting numerals which are still used in various forms by shepherds throughout the area, and apparently for knitting.
Many of the traditional dialect words are also remnants of Norse influence, including beck (bekkr, 'stream'), laik (leik, 'to play'), lowp (hlaupa, 'to jump') and glisky (gliskr, 'shimmering').
In the nineteenth century miners from Cornwall and Wales began relocating to Cumbria to take advantage of the work offered by new iron ore, copper and wadd mines but whilst they seem to have affected some local accents (notably Barrow-in-Furness) they don't seem to have contributed much to the vocabulary.
⟨l⟩ in the word final position may be dropped or realised as [w]: woo wool [ˈwəw]; pow pole [ˈpɒw].
⟨t⟩ is traditionally always pronounced as a voiceless alveolar plosive, although in many places it has been replaced by the glottal stop [ʔ] now common throughout Britain.
Finally, in some parts of the county, there is a tendency to palatalize the consonant cluster ⟨cl⟩ in word-initial and medial position, thereby rendering it as something more closely approaching [tl].
The Cumbrian numbers, often called 'sheep counting numerals' because of their (declining) use by shepherds to this very day, show clear signs that they may well have their origins in Cumbric.
The table below shows the variation of the numbers throughout Cumbria, as well as the relevant cognate in Welsh, Cornish and Breton, which are the three geographically closest British languages to Cumbric, for comparison.
[8] Ewan Clark, a contemporary of Nelson's, also wrote a handful of dialect imitations that were included in his Miscellaneous Poems (Whitehaven 1779).
Female members of the gentry writing in dialect at this time included Susanna Blamire and her companion Catherine Gilpin.
[10] This contained work by all the poets mentioned already, with the addition of some songs by John Rayson that were later to be included in his Miscellaneous Poems and Ballads (London, 1858).
Some later poets include John Sewart (Rhymes in the Westmoreland Dialect, Settle, 1869) and Gwordie Greenup (the pseudonym of Stanley Martin), who published short collections in prose and verse during the 1860s and 1870s.
Like Liverpool this is down to the large numbers of settlers from various regions (including predominantly Scotland, elsewhere in England and Ireland amongst other locations).