Scouse
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Scouse is the accent and dialect of English found in the northern English city of Liverpool and adjoining urban areas of Merseyside, northwestern Cheshire and Skelmersdale, West Lancashire. The Liverpool 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 often called 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 (food) made with lamb stew mixed with hardtack eaten by sailors.
Lancashire has one of the most diverse selections of spoken accents of any English county or region. This is thought to be due to the large amount of immigration into the Liverpool area from Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Scotland, other parts of northern England inland from it, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influence of these speech patterns was strong in Liverpool, distinguishing the accent of its people from those of surrounding Lancashire and Cheshire.
Other Northern English dialects include
- Geordie (spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne)
- Pitmatic (spoken in Durham)
- Tyke (Yorkshire)
- Mackem (spoken in Sunderland)
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 [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.
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.
Irish influences include the pronunciation of the letter 'h' as 'haitch' and the plural of 'you' as 'youse'. There are also idioms shared with Hiberno-English, such as "I know where you're at" (Standard English: "I know who you are").
Expressions include 'lah' (or rarely, 'lid', with an emphasis on the 'i') as an abbreviation of lad, used to mean mate or pal, e.g. "alright lah!"
Scouse-speaking celebrities
Scouse can be heard from:- The Beatles (talking) especially George Harrison and Ringo Starr.
- Gerry and the Pacemakers
- Echo and the Bunnymen
- The singer Heidi Range
- The actor Craig Charles
- The actor Ricky Tomlinson
- The actress Claire Sweeney
- The footballers Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher and Robbie Fowler
- Former Football Manager Peter Reid
- The Zutons
- The Coral
- The La's
- Wakko Warner from Animaniacs
- John Constantine
- The Dungbeetles from Conker's Bad Fur Day and
See also
References
- 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 online] (including sound files).
- Wells, J. C. (1982). Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521285402.
External links
- [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 0901367036)
- IANA [IANA registered languages] (2004)
- IETF [RFC3066 - Tags for the Identification of Languages] (2001)
- [- 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]
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