Information about Scouse

Scouse is the accent and dialect of English found in the north-western English city of Liverpool and in some adjoining urban areas of Merseyside. The Scouse accent is highly distinctive and sounds wholly different from the accents used in the neighbouring regions of Cheshire and rural Lancashire. Inhabitants of Liverpool are called Liverpudlians, but are more often described by the slang term Scousers.

The word Scouse was originally a variation of lobscouse (probably from the north German sailor's dish Labskaus), the name of a traditional dish of Scouse made with lamb stew mixed with hardtack eaten by sailors. Alternative recipes have included beef and thickened with the gelatin source found in cowheel or pig trotter in addition to various root vegetables. Other sources suggest that "labskaus" is a Norwegian term ("lapskaus" in Norwegian), and considering the number of Merseyside place-names ending in "-by" (Formby, Crosby, Kirkby, Greasby, Pensby, Roby), a Viking rather than German source must be considered. Various spellings can still be traced, including "lobscows" from Wales, and some families refer to this stew as "lobby" rather than scouse. In Leigh, between Liverpool and Manchester, there is even a "Lobby shop". The dish was traditionally the fare of the poor people, using the cheapest cuts of meat available, and indeed when no meat at all was available scouse was still made, but this "vegetarian" version was known as "blind scouse". The term remained a purely local word until its popularisation in the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, which some also believe to have introduced stereotypes about Liverpudlians.^[1]

The roots of the accent can be traced back to the large numbers of immigrants into the Liverpool area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including those from the Isle of Man, Wales, Scotland and, most substantially, Ireland. 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. The Survey of English Dialects ignored Liverpool completely, and the dialect researcher Ellis said that Liverpool [and Birkenhead] had "no dialect proper".^[2]

Phonology

The characteristic features of the accent of the region are discussed in section 4.4.10 of Wells (1982).

Consonants

A notable feature of Scouse is its tendency towards lenition of stop consonants (Honeybone 2001, sections 4 and 5, Marotta and Barth 2005). In particular

• The /k/ phoneme is often pronounced [x], especially at the end of a word, so that back [bax] sounds like German Bach and lock [lɒx] sounds like Scottish English loch. In other positions /k/ may be realised as an affricate [kx].
• There are several possibilities for the /t/ phoneme in Scouse. In some contexts, it may be realised as an alveolar slit fricative, [θ̠] or as a similar affricate [tθ̠]; these sounds may sound like [s] and [ts] respectively. The sounds [s] and [ts] themselves may also be used. Hence right may be heard as rice or rights.
• In some words, for example but and what, the final /t/ may be replaced by [h] or a flap [ɾ], which may be heard as an /r/.
• More rarely, lenition can also affect /p/, which may be realised as a bilabial fricative [ɸ], and /d/, which undergoes lenition similar to that of /t/, producing a voiced slit fricative [ğ̠] or affricate [dğ̠]. (Marotta and Barth 2005)

The th sounds /θ, ğ/ may be pronounced as dental [t, d]. This feature is shared with Hiberno-English.

The velar nasal [ŋ] is usually followed by a hard [g] sound in words where most other English accents have it at the end of a word or before a vowel, so that sing is [sɪŋg] as opposed to [sɪŋ] in Received Pronunciation. See Ng coalescence.

The /r/ sound is often a tap [ɾ], similar to Scots.

Vowels

Features of Scouse vowels include:

• The nurse-square vowel merger, so that fur and fair sound the same. Phonetically, the merged vowel is typically [eː].
• As elsewhere in the north of England, the accent does not use the broad A, pronouncing words like bath with the [a] of cat, and the vowels put and putt are often the same.
• Unlike most other northern English accents, the vowels of face and goat (Received Pronunciation /eɪ/ and /əʊ/) are pronounced as diphthongs similar to those of RP.

Other 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. This has led to some people from the Midlands referring to Liverpool people as "Sing-song Scousers".

Irish influences include the pronunciation of the letter 'h' as 'haitch' and the plural of 'you' as 'youse'.

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 dialect. These differences between both the north side and the south side of the city can be seen in the pronunciation of the vowels. The northern half of the city more frequently pronounce the words book, cook, look and took, as in the words boo, coo, loo and too, and then adding the k sound at the end. The southern half of the city shows a greater likeness to the more common pronunciation of these words.

Comparison with recordings made since the 1960s support the notion that the Scouse accent is ever-changing. The Scouse accent of the early 21st century is markedly different in certain respects to that of earlier decades.

Scouse-speaking personalities

See also .

Scouse can be heard from:

• Nicky Allt, playwright
• Michael Angelis, actor and voice artist
• Cilla Black, singer, and TV presenter
• Neil Buchanan, children's TV presenter
• Pete Burns, singer
• Jamie Carragher, footballer
• Craig Charles, actor
• Chris Fisher, Radio Presenter
• Margi Clarke, actress
• Echo and the Bunnymen
• Steven Gerrard, footballer
• Paul O'Grady, TV presenter and drag queen
• Gerry and the Pacemakers
• Paul Jewell, former manager of Wigan Athletic
• Dave Kirby, poet and playwright
• John Parrott, snooker player and TV presenter
• Heidi Range, singer
• Wayne Rooney, footballer
• Claire Sweeney, actress
• Jennifer Ellison, model and actress
• Ricky Tomlinson, actor
• The Beatles
• Dale Roberts Jnr, Famous Singer/Actor, also famous for being the only gay in the village
• The Zutons
• The Las
• The Real People, Cult Liverpool Brit Pop band
• Geoff Rowley, Professional Skateboarder
• Jimmy Tarbuck Loveable Scouser
• Matthew Leather
• Ladytron Daniel Hunt and Reuben Wu (Wu's accent is at a lesser degree to Hunt's)
• JGM, musician

In addition, the following fictional characters speak scouse:

• Moxey from Auf Wiedersehen Pet
• Characters (notably Yosser Hughes (Bernard Hill) from cult series Boys from the Blackstuff
• John Constantine
• The Dungbeetles from Conker's Bad Fur Day and
• "The Scousers" from Harry Enfield's Television Programme
• Dave Lister from Red Dwarf
• Super Scouse - The narrator of the song Convoy GB, by DJ Dave Lee Travis
• Wakko Warner from Animaniacs
• Ron Nasty of The Rutles
• Combo from This Is England
• Thomas The Tank Engine & Friends (Voice was done by Ringo Starr, Beatles member)

References

• 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., (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

• Sounds Familiar? — Listen to examples of Scouse and other regional accents and dialects of the UK on the British Library's 'Sounds Familiar' website
• 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)
• Culinary.Senses.com has two recipes for Scouse. The Everton Scouse (53835) is the more amusing and also tastier. The 43613 Country Fare - Liverpool Scouse proposes beef instead of the traditional lamb.
• Dialect Poems from the English regions
• MERSEYTALK

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