Scouse
From Free net encyclopedia
Template:IPA notice Scouse is the accent and dialect of English found in the northern English city of Liverpool and adjoining urban areas of Merseyside and northwestern Cheshire. 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 mutton 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)
Contents |
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 Template:IPA phoneme is often pronounced Template:IPA, especially at the end of a word, so that back Template:IPA sounds like German Bach and lock Template:IPA sounds like Scottish English loch. In other positions Template:IPA may be realised as an affricate Template:IPA.
- There are several possibilities for the Template:IPA phoneme in Scouse. In some contexts, it may be realised as an alveolar slit fricative, Template:IPA or as a similar affricate Template:IPA; these sounds may sound like Template:IPA and Template:IPA respectively. The sounds Template:IPA and Template:IPA themselves may also be used. Hence right may be heard as rice or rights.
- In some words, for example but and what, the final Template:IPA may be replaced by Template:IPA or a flap Template:IPA, which may be heard as an Template:IPA.
- More rarely, lenition can also affect Template:IPA, which may be realised as a bilabial fricative Template:IPA, and Template:IPA, which undergoes lenition similar to that of Template:IPA, producing a voiced slit fricative Template:IPA or affricate Template:IPA. (Marotta and Barth 2005)
The th sounds Template:IPA may be pronounced as dental Template:IPA. This feature is shared with Hiberno-English.
The velar nasal Template:IPA is usually followed by a hard Template:IPA sound in words where most other English accents have it at the end of a word or before a vowel, so that sing is Template:IPA as opposed to Template:IPA in Received Pronunciation. See Ng coalescence.
The Template:IPA sound is often a tap Template:IPA, 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 Template:IPA.
- As elsewhere in the north of England, the accent does not use the broad A, pronouncing words like bath with the Template:IPA 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 Template:IPA and Template:IPA) 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 'lid', as an abbreviation of lad, used to mean mate or pal, e.g. "alright lid!"
Scouse-speaking celebrities
Scouse can be heard from:
- the Beatles (talking) especially George Harrison.
- Gerry and the Pacemakers
- Echo and the Bunnymen
- the singer Cilla Black
- the actor Craig Charles
- the actor Ricky Tomlinson
- cartoon character Wakko Warner
- the footballers Wayne Rooney, Steven Gerrard and Jamie Carragher
- former football manager Peter Reid
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)de:Scouse