The county encompassed several hundred mill towns and collieries and by the 1830s, approximately 85% of all cotton manufactured worldwide was processed in Lancashire.

[1] It was during this period that most writing in and about the dialect took place, when Lancashire covered a much larger area than it does today (at least from an administrative point of view—the historic county boundary remains unchanged).

[8] Alexander John Ellis, one of the first to apply phonetics to English speech, divided the county of Lancashire into four areas.

[19] In 1981, Wright published a book The Lanky Twang: How it is spoke that explained the dialects of Lancashire through a series of illustrations, often humorous.

[21] There were several other monographs written by dialectologists by Harold Orton's department at the University of Leeds, including some urban areas such as Bury, Middleton, St. Helens and Southport.

[22] Graham Shorrocks, a linguist from Farnworth, conducted a series of research projects on the dialect of the Bolton area.

[23] John C. Wells, who grew up in Up Holland,[24][25] made some passing comments on Lancastrian speech (mostly on the southern parts of the county) in his 1982 series of books, Accents of English.

The linguist Peter Trudgill specified a "Central Lancashire" dialect region, defined particularly by its rhoticity, around Blackburn, Preston and the northern parts of Greater Manchester.

[38] An accompanying book, Talking for Britain: a journey through the voices of a nation, was published in 2005; the author noted that the speech of Lancashire in 2005 differed markedly from "the impenetrable tracts of rural Lancastrian that the Survey of English Dialects found in the 1950s".

[48] Many of these gave commentaries on the poverty of the working class at the time and occasional political sentiments: for example, the ballad Jone o Grinfilt portrayed an unemployed handloom worker who would rather die as a soldier in a foreign war than starve at home.

The Lancashire Authors Association was founded in 1909 and still exists for writers in the dialect, producing an annual paper called The Record.

[58][59] In April 2011, Pendle Borough Council printed phrases from local dialect poems on stone-cube artworks in the area.

[64] The Association’s library collection was founded in Horwich in 1921 and contains dialect works by authors including Edwin Waugh, Samuel Laycock and Teddy Ashton.

R. G. Shepherd contributed many articles interesting both for their philosophy and their excursions into local dialect to The West Lancashire Gazette and The Fleetwood Chronicle.

[72] In 1979, the Houghton Weavers presented a series on local folk music on BBC North West entitled Sit thi deawn.