Additional influences came from contact with Old Norse during the Viking Age; with Irish English following the Great Famine, particularly in Lancashire and the south of Yorkshire; and with Midlands dialects since the Industrial Revolution.

[2] Traditional dialects are associated with many of the historic counties of England, and include those of Cumbria, Lancashire, Northumbria, and Yorkshire.

Summarising the views of several scholars, Wales (2006) highlights some features of accents and dialects in the North West influenced by Hiberno-English, such as the dental articulation of dat ("that") and tree ("three"), and the usage of yous as the second-person plural pronoun.

[11]: 353–356 The foot–strut split is absent in Northern English, so that, for example, cut and put rhyme and are both pronounced with /ʊ/; words like love, up, tough, judge, etc.

[11]: 351–353 The Received Pronunciation phonemes /eɪ/ (as in face) and /əʊ/ (as in goat) are often pronounced as monophthongs (such as [eː] and [oː]), or as older diphthongs (such as /ɪə/ and /ʊə/).

However, the quality of these vowels varies considerably across the region, and this is considered a greater indicator of a speaker's social class than the less stigmatised aspects listed above.

The /ɒ/ vowel of LOT is a fully open [ɒ] rather than the open-mid [ɔ] of modern Received Pronunciation and Southern England English.

[11]: 356 The most common R sound, when pronounced in Northern England, is the typical English postalveolar approximantⓘ; however, an alveolar tapⓘ is also widespread, particularly following a consonant or between vowels.

[31] Under the Northern Subject Rule, the suffix "-s", which in Standard English grammar only appears in the third-person singular present, is attached to verbs in many present- and past-tense forms (leading to, for example, "the birds sings").

More generally, third-person singular forms of irregular verbs, such as to be, may be used with plurals and other grammatical persons; for instance "the lambs is out".

A few other Scottish traits are also found in far Northern dialects, such as double modal verbs (might could instead of might be able to), but these are restricted in their distribution and are mostly dying out.

In some case, these allow the distinction between formality and familiarity to be maintained, while in others thou is a generic second-person singular, and you (or ye) is restricted to the plural.

Some of these are now shared with Scottish English and the Scots language, with terms such as bairn ("child"), bonny ("beautiful"), gang or gan ("go/gone/going") and kirk ("church") found on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border.

Other terms in the top ten included a set of three indefinite pronouns owt ("anything"), nowt ("naught" or "nothing") and summat ("something"), the Anglo-Scottish bairn, bonny and gang, and sel/sen ("self") and mun ("must").