Scouse


Scouse is an accent and dialect of English originating in the northwest county of Merseyside. The Scouse accent is highly distinctive and has little in common with those of the neighbouring regions. It was primarily confined to Liverpool until the 1950s, when slum clearance resulted in migration from Liverpool into newly-developed surrounding areas of Merseyside. The accent is named after scouse, a stew eaten by sailors and people who worked down at the docks.
The continued development of Liverpool since the 1950s has spread the accent into nearby areas such as the towns of Runcorn and Widnes. Variations within Scouse have been noted, with the faster accent of the city's centre and northern areas typically being described as "harsh" and "gritty" and the slower accent of the southern suburbs being referred to as "soft" and "dark". Popular local sayings also show a growing deviation from the historical Lancashire dialect and a growth in the influence of the accent in the wider area. Natives and/or residents of Liverpool are formally referred to as Liverpudlians, but are more often called Scousers.
The north Liverpool accent has been featured in mainstream media, often serving only to be mocked in comedy shows such as Harry Enfield & Chums and its Scousers sketch. It is consistently voted one of the least popular accents in the UK, usually beaten only by the Birmingham accent. Conversely, it is also rated one of the friendliest UK accents alongside that of Newcastle. The northern variation of Scouse has become so synonymous with Liverpool that outsiders often mistakenly believe that the Beatles-like south Liverpool accent no longer exists, and it is not uncommon for those from the southern suburbs to encounter people who doubt that they are from Liverpool.

Etymology

The word is a shortened form of lobscouse, the origin of which is uncertain. It is related to the Norwegian lapskaus, Swedish lapskojs, and Danish labskovs, as well as the Low German labskaus, and refers to a stew of the same name commonly eaten by sailors. In the 19th century, poorer people in Liverpool, Birkenhead, Bootle and Wallasey commonly ate scouse as it was a cheap dish, and familiar to the families of seafarers. Outsiders tended to call these people scousers. In The Lancashire Dictionary of Dialect, Tradition and Folklore, Alan Crosby suggested that the word only became known nationwide with the popularity of the BBC sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, which featured a Liverpudlian socialist and a Cockney conservative in regular argument.

Origins

Originally a small fishing village, Liverpool developed as a port, trading particularly with Ireland, and after the 1700s as a major international trading and industrial centre. The city consequently became a melting pot of several languages and dialects, as sailors and traders from different areas established themselves in the area. Until the mid-19th century, the dominant local accent was similar to that of neighbouring areas of Lancashire. The influence of Irish and Welsh migrants, combined with European accents, contributed to a distinctive local Liverpool accent. The first reference to a distinctive Liverpool accent was in 1890. Linguist Gerald Knowles suggested that the accent's nasal quality may have derived from poor 19th-century public health, by which the prevalence of colds for many people over a long time resulted in a nasal accent becoming regarded as the norm and copied by others learning the language.

Academic research

The period of early dialect research in Great Britain did little to cover Scouse. The early researcher Alexander John Ellis said that Liverpool and Birkenhead "had no dialect proper", as he conceived of dialects as speech that had been passed down through generations from the earliest Germanic speakers. Ellis did research some locations on the Wirral, but these respondents spoke in traditional Cheshire dialect at the time and not in Scouse. The 1950s Survey of English Dialects recorded traditional Lancastrian dialect from the town of Halewood and found no trace of Scouse influence. The phonetician John C Wells wrote that "the Scouse accent might as well not exist" in The Linguistic Atlas of England, which was the Survey's principal output.
The first academic study of Scouse was undertaken by Gerald Knowles at the University of Leeds in 1973. He identified the key problem being that traditional dialect research had focused on developments from a single proto-language, but Scouse had resulted from interactions between an unknown number of proto-languages. He also noted that the means by which Scouse was so easily distinguished from other British accents could not be adequately summarised by traditional phonetic notation.

Phonetics and phonology

The phonemic notation used in this article is based on the set of symbols used by.

Vowels

Monophthongs

Some of the more notable Irish influences include the pronunciation of the name of the letter H with h-adding, so it is said as, and the second person plural "you" as "yous". The use of "me" instead of "my" is also present, i.e. "that's me book you got there" instead of "that's my book you've got there". An exception occurs when "my" is emphasised in an example such as "that's my book ". Other common Scouse features include the use of "giz" instead of "give us", which became famous throughout the UK through Boys from the Blackstuff in 1982; the use of the term "made up" to mean "extremely happy", such as in "I'm made up I didn't go out last night"; and the terms "sound" for "okay" and "boss" for "great", which can also be used to answer questions of wellbeing such as "I'm boss" in reply to "How are you?" and can also be used sarcastically in negative circumstances.

International recognition

Scouse is highly distinguishable from other English dialects. Because of this international recognition, Keith Szlamp made a request to IANA on 16 September 1996 to make it a recognised Internet dialect. After citing a number of references, the application was accepted on 25 May 2000 and now allows Internet documents that use the dialect to be categorised as Scouse by using the language tag "en-Scouse".
Scouse has also become well known as the accent of the Beatles, an international cultural phenomenon. While the members of the band are famously from Liverpool, their accents have more in common with the older Lancashire-like Liverpool dialect found in the southern suburbs; the accent has evolved into Scouse since the 1960s, mostly in the centre and northern areas of the city, with some experts identifying the improvement of air quality as a potential factor.

Vocabulary