A CHAMPION of Lanky Twang has called on a popular board game to help resurrect the county’s lost language.

Lancashire dialect expert Sid Calderbank spoke out after Scrabble added 6,500 new words to the existing quarter of a million in the latest Collins Scrabble list – including Lolz, shizzle and cakehole.

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Sid, who has been researching and collecting songs, stories and poems of old Lancashire for the past 30 years, hopes changes in the rules will open the door for Red Rose phrases to start scoring points.

He said: “These new words are remarkably similar to the Lancashire dialect ways of spelling things, like changing the spelling of door and floor.

“If you’re in Blackburn, door would be spelled ‘dooer’.

“I read a lot of Victorian and 19th century Lancashire dialect books.

“If you went from one town to another they would use different spellings to show how it was pronounced.

“Also the new words are very familiar to the Lancashire way of abbreviating like, ‘has the dustbin man been yet mother’ becomes ‘hast’bin man bin mam?’ “It’s the sort of thing we have done historically in Lancashire when people have written words down so they are pronounced in the way you’d want the reader to say them.”

The Scrabble wordlist now includes a host of slang words used on social media, in texts and on the street.

These include obvs (obviously), ridic (ridiculous), lolz (laughs), shizzle (form of US rap slang), cakehole (mouth), and dench (excellent).

Sid is giving a guided dialect poetry walk to Waugh’s Well from Edenfield, Rossendale, on Saturday, June 13.

He won an award for his use of Lancashire-isms in 2010.