Scouse

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This article is about the accent. For the food, see scouse (food).
This article is about the accent. For the type of dance music, see Scouse house.

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Scouse (pronounced /ˈskaʊs/) is the accent and dialect of English found in the city of Liverpool, and in some adjoining urban areas of Merseyside, mainly The Wirral but also in the new town areas of Runcorn and Skelmersdale. 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 colloquialism Scousers.

The word Scouse was originally a variation of "lobscouse"[1], 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 sauce found in cowheel or pig trotter in addition to various root vegetables. The word "lobscouse" may be of Norwegian origin ("lapskaus" in Norwegian), which is possible, considering the Viking background of the area, illustrated by the number of Merseyside place-names ending in "-by" (city in Scandinavian)(Formby, Crosby, Kirkby, Greasby, Pensby, Roby). Various spellings can still be traced, including "lobscows" from Wales, and some families refer to this stew as "lobby" rather than scouse, as in the Potteries (Stoke-on-Trent), where a 'bowl of lobby' is a welcome meal on a cold winter's night.[citation needed] 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".[citation needed] 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. It is also thought that there may once have been a giant man that came from the area called "Jon Scouse"[2]

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, 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 Survey of English Dialects ignored Liverpool completely, and the dialect researcher Ellis said that Liverpool [and Birkenhead] had "no dialect proper".[3]

Contents

[edit] Phonology

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

[edit] 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. 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 [ð̠] or affricate [dð̠]. (Marotta and Barth 2005)

The th sounds /θ, ð/ 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.

[edit] Vowels

Features of Scouse vowels include:

  • The Fur-fair 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 and cat with the same vowel, [a].
  • The vowels put and putt are often the same, both [ʊ].
  • The vowel [i:] is pronounced [əi:], for example "Steve" and "need" would become sort of "Staeeve" amd "Naeed".
  • 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.
  • Women and men pronounce the letter 'o' differently. Women tend to pronounce it in a very similar way to RP /əʊ/ whereas men pronounce it in the harder and rounder /oː/ way found in Salford. Up until puberty all Scouse children make the /əʊ/ sound but mysteriously this changes for most boys at around the time their voices break. However this change is restricted to the scouse districts of Liverpool, south Sefton, west St. Helens and Knowsley; Wirral boys generally keep /əʊ/.[citation needed]

[edit] 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".[citation needed]

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, though not universal, 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.[citation needed]

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[citation needed].

[edit] Scouse-speaking personalities

See also Liverpudlians.


Scouse can be heard from:

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

[edit] References

  1. ^ Online Etymology Dictionary, Chambers
  2. ^ Alan Crosby, The Lancashire Dictionary, p.179
  3. ^ http://www.englang.ed.ac.uk/people/livengkoi.pdfPDF (495 KiB) page 2
  • 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).

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

Liverpudlians