scouse

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Location of Merseyside within England.

Scouse (pronounced /ˈskaʊs/) is the accent and dialect of English found in the city of Liverpool and also in some adjoining urban areas of Liverpool in Merseyside. This is particularly strong within areas of neighbouring borough's of south Sefton and Knowsley.

The variety of Scouse spoken on the Wirral has several differences in speech patterns and pronunciation and has been referred to as 'posh scouse'. Wirral inhabitants are often and somewhat negatively referred to as plastic scousers.

There are more variations found in the new town areas of Runcorn and Skelmersdale and also in Ellesmere Port in south Wirral.

While the Scouse accent is highly distinctive it sounds wholly different from the accents used in the neighbouring regions of Cheshire and rural Lancashire. Even within the Merseyside county itself, accents in St Helens and Southport, for example, are by contrast completely different and are more Lancastrian.

Inhabitants of Liverpool are called Liverpudlians but are more often described by the colloquialism Scousers. ^[1]

Likely origin of the term "Scouse" meaning a person from Liverpool

A "pan of scouse" was, and still is, a common meal in working class Liverpool. This culinary delight (a thick stew usually of lamb with vegetables slow cooked in a pan to make cheap cuts of meat more palatable) takes its name from the Norwegian 'lapskaus'. The shortened and anglicised version of this Norwegian word is "scouse" and is part of a genre of slang terms which refer to people by stereotypes of their dietary habits, i.e. Pom, Limey, Rosbif (Australian, American and French slang respectively for the English), Frog (English slang denoting a French national), and Kraut (an English colloquial ethnonym for a German).

In the 18th and 19th centuries Liverpool, being arguably the second largest port in the world at the time, found itself inundated with foreign seamen, especially Norwegian, looking for a berth on any ship. There is still a Scandinavian Seamen's Churches in Liverpool built in the 19th century. [1] In fact Norwegian or Scandinavian seamen's churches proliferated in many British ports in the late 19th century. [2] To warrant the building of these churches there must have been a sufficiency of worshippers. It is therefore more than likely that these Scandinavian seamen introduced into the British Isles their national dish.

From the late 19th century and up till about 1970 there was a Norwegian Shipping Federation office just off Castle Street in Liverpool [3] This employment office was initially opened to find berths for Norwegian seamen on Norwegian ships but early in its existence seafaring Liverpudlians also availed themselves of its services. However, by the middle of the 20th century this employment office, due to pressure from the British Shipping Federation, discouraged applications from British seaman. Those Liverpudlians who had however obtained jobs on Norwegian vessels developed a taste for lapskaus and consequently brought the recipe back to Liverpool, where it soon became a popular and nourishing dish. The word Liverpudlian is a mouthful for anybody to say so the term Scouse soon replaced it.

History of the accent

The roots of the accent can be traced back to the large numbers of immigrants into Liverpool in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including those from the Isle of Man, Wales, Scandinavia, Germany, Scotland and, most substantially, Ireland.^{[citation needed]} The influence of these different speech patterns became apparent in Liverpool, distinguishing the accent of its people from those of the surrounding Lancashire and Cheshire areas. It is only recently that Scouse has been treated as a cohesive accent/dialect; for many years, Liverpool was simply seen as a melting pot of different accents with no one to call its own.^{[citation needed]}

The early dialect researcher A.J. Ellis said that Liverpool [and Birkenhead] had "no dialect proper".^[2] The Survey of English Dialects did investigate Halewood, which is just outside the city council boundaries. However, no audio recording was ever taken from the site, and all the notes were done in phonetic transcriptions.

Other northern English dialects include

• Geordie (spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne)
• Pitmatic (spoken in Durham and Northumberland)
• Tyke (spoken in Yorkshire)
• Mackem (spoken in Sunderland)
• Mancunian (spoken in Manchester)
• Lancashire dialect and accent, which varies across the county.

Phonological features

Scouse is noted for a fast, highly accented manner of speech, with a range of rising and falling tones not typical of most of northern England.

Irish influences include the pronunciation of the letter 'h' as /heɪtʃ/ and the 2nd Person plural (you) as 'youse/yous' /juːz/.

There are variations on the Scouse accent, with the south side of the city adopting a softer, lyrical tone, and the north a rougher, more gritty accent. Those differences, though not universal, can be seen in the pronunciation of the vowels. The northern half of the city more frequently pronounces words such as 'book' and 'cook' differently, whereas the southern half of the city is closer to the RP English pronunciation of these words. The use of a long /uː/ in such words was once used across the whole of Britain, but is now confined to the more traditional accents of Northern England and Scotland.^[3]

The Scouse accent of the early 21st century is markedly different in certain respects to that of earlier decades.^{[citation needed]}. The Liverpool accent of the 1950s and before was more a Lancashire-Irish hybrid. But since then, as with most accents and dialects, Scouse has been subject to phonemic evolution and change. Over the last few decades the accent is no longer a melange but has started to develop further. One could compare the way George Harrison and John Lennon spoke in the old Beatles films such as A Hard Day's Night and compare with modern Scousers such as Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher. Harrison pronounced the word 'fair' more like the standard English 'fur' - as Cilla Black does still. This is a pure Lancashire trait but modern Scousers do it the other way round pronouncing 'fur' like 'fair'. Huge changes have taken place in Scouse vowels, which show astonishing length and exaggeration at times in words like 'read' but conversely shorter than standard in a word like 'sleep'. A final 'er' is a sound whilst pronounced 'schwa' in surrounding Lancashire and Cheshire is emphasised strongly as the 'e' in 'pet' /pɛt/. In a strong Scouse accent, the phoneme /k/ in all positions of a word except the beginning can be realised as /x/ or sometimes /kx/.

Rhoticity was not transferred through the immigration of the distinctly rhotic Irish accents, and therefore one can class Scouse as a non-rhotic accent. This means that /r/ in a word is pronounced only if it is followed by a vowel sound.

The use of the glottal stop as an allophone of /t/ can occur in various positions, including after a stressed syllable. This is called T-glottalisation, and is particularly common amongst the younger speakers of the Scouse accent. /t/ may also be flapped intervocalically.

The loss of dental fricatives was commonly attributed as being present due to Irish English influence. The phonemes /ð/ and /θ/ were realised as /d/ and /t/ respectively. However in the younger generation, this feature is being outnumbered by those who realise them as voiced and voiceless labiodental fricatives, see below.

• /θ/ becomes [f] in all environments. [θɪnk] becomes [fɪnk] for "think"
• /ð/ becomes [v] in all environments except word-initially when it is [d]. [dɪðə] becomes [dɪvɛ] for "dither," [ðəʊ] becomes [dəʊ] for "though."

The use of me instead of my was also attributed to Irish English influence, for example, "That's me book you got there" for "That's my book you've got there". This cannot be used when "my" is emphasised, i.e., "That's my book you got there" (and not "his").

Scouse-speaking personalities

See also Liverpudlians.

Scouse can be heard from:

In addition, the following fictional characters speak with a Scouse accent:

• Albie, psychotic murderer played by Robert Carlyle in the ITV series Cracker
• Moxey from Auf Wiedersehen Pet
• Characters (notably Yosser Hughes (Bernard Hill) from cult series Boys from the Blackstuff
• Francis Scully from drama series Scully
• Scouse Steve from the E4 series Fonejacker
• The Beets from Doug
• Runaway teenagers Billy Rizley (David Morrissey) and 'Icky' Higson (Spencer Leigh) from Willy Russell's play One Summer
• John Constantine
• The Dungbeetles from Conker's Bad Fur Day and Conker: Live & Reloaded
• "The Scousers" from Harry Enfield's Television Programme
• Dave Lister (played by Craig Charles) from Red Dwarf
• Super Scouse - The narrator of the song Convoy GB, by DJ Dave Lee Travis
• Wakko Warner from Animaniacs
• Dane McGowan in Grant Morrison's The Invisibles
• Ron Nasty of The Rutles
• Combo from This Is England
• Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends (Some narration and voices performed by Ringo Starr of The Beatles and Michael Angelis)
• Radio from Sonic the Hedgehog.
• Zak Ramsey from Hollyoaks
• Hayley Ramsey from Hollyoaks
• Zebedee, fictional character from children's television series TUGS
• Charachters played by Robert Carlyle, Rhys Ifans, and Emily Mortimer in The 51st State (Formula 51 in the US)
• The Duck Brothers from Courage the Cowardly Dog, voiced by Ringo Starr and Samuel Vincent.
• Matthew Macfadyen's character in the BBC two part drama, Warriors. His character spoke Scouse.
• Ruby, Iris and May Moss, three sisters in the 2007 BBC eight-part drama Lilies set in 1920s Liverpool have Scouse accents.

References

Notes

Bibliography

• Black, William. (2005). The Land that Thyme Forgot. Bantam. ISBN 0593 053621.  p. 348
• Honeybone, P. (2001), Lenition inhibition in Liverpool English, English Language and Linguistics 5.2, pp213–249.
• Marotta, G. and Barth, M., Acoustic and sociolingustic aspects of lenition in Liverpool English, Studi Linguistici e Filologici Online 3.2, pp377–413. Available onlinePDF (978 KiB) (including sound files).

Further reading

• Shaw, F. and Spiegl, F. and Kelly, S., (1966). How to Talk Proper in Liverpool (Lern Yerself Scouse S.) Liverpool:Scouse Press. ISBN 0-901367-01-X
• Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28540-2.

External links

• [4] – Accent example: A working-class woman from Speke, Liverpool in Merseyside, being interviewed about her life for the British Museum's Collect Britain website. (Requires Windows Media player).
• Sounds Familiar? – Listen to examples of Scouse and other regional accents and dialects of the UK on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website
• 'Hover & Hear' Scouse pronunciations, and compare with other accents from the UK and around the World.
• English Accents and Dialects, British Library Collect Britain website features samples of Liverpool speech (wma format, with annotations on phonology, lexis and grammar):
• BBC - Liverpool Local History - Learn to speak Scouse!
• A. B. Z. of Scouse (Lern Yerself Scouse) (ISBN 0-901367-03-6)
• IANA registration form for the en-scouse tag
• IETF RFC 4646 - Tags for Identifying Languages (2006)
• Dialect Poems from the English regions
• Visit Liverpool The official tourist board website to Liverpool
• A Scouser in New York An on-air segment that airs on City Talk Radio during Rob McLoughlin's show (7am to 10am - Sundays)