[21] 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 (1965–1975), which featured a Liverpudlian socialist and a Cockney conservative in regular argument. For the most part of England, that distinction has gone,” he added. Edit: Cilla Black is another celebrity with a strong Scouse accent. “Liverpool English likely emerged around the mid-19th century after a period of much immigration,” explains Dr Amanda Cardoso, a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of British Colombia in Canada. Liverpool might have first been established in 1190, but it wasn’t registered until 1207, when King John granted it a Royal Charter.

[51] While the members of the band are famously from Liverpool,[52] 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 identifying the improvement of air quality as a potential factor. [14], 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. I've got a bit of a scouse accent and found it very easy to pronounce Dutch words when I moved there to work. The influence of Irish and Welsh migrants, combined with European accents, contributed to a distinctive local Liverpool accent. It was primarily confined to Liverpool until the 1950s, when slum clearance resulted in migration from Liverpool into newly-developed surrounding areas of Merseyside. I'm sure many people outside the UK have heard at least one Scouse accent before, even if they didn't know it, namely Craig Charles in Red Dwarf. [20] 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. While it was a hit among tourists and merited a glowing review in the Times Literary Supplement, some Liverpudlians took umbrage with the volume. [7] 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"[8] and the slower accent of the southern suburbs being referred to as "soft" and "dark". Sorry, there was a problem with your subscription. The Liverpool accent has been celebrated in the city and beyond for centuries (Photos: Getty) This is part of new series from i on accents. “There’s a very long link between the Baltic and Liverpool,” the expert said. “It also happens with ‘p’ and ‘t’, so you can have the end of the word ‘but’ sound like an ‘s’ – ‘but’ ends up sounding a bit like ‘bus’. The Scouse accent is one of the most distinctive and well known in the UK. An Irish academic in Liverpool recently suggested the city should join Ireland after a survey revealed a vast majority of its residents would willingly leave the UK following Brexit, with the city also sharing close linguistic and cultural ties with the republic. 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. Scouse is highly distinguishable from other English dialects. Press question mark to learn the rest of the keyboard shortcuts.

[23] The first reference to a distinctive Liverpool accent was in 1890. A lot of Liverpudlian seamen brought the music back with them after they travelled to the States, which influenced the cultural offerings at the time. It won’t come as a surprise to many that the Liverpudlian accent and dialect has been heavily influenced by Irish immigration. The accent is named after scouse, a stew eaten by sailors and people who worked down at the docks. “Once you talk to other people, once you talk about a northern urban accent, you do get those perceptions more representative of the ‘Calm Down’ Harry Enfield sketch,” he said.

[22], 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. “There was an outcry from the north end of the city, in places like Bootle, who complained it was south-end Scouse. While the word might have been used in Liverpool for a long time – Dr Crowley discovered a source that first used the term in 1797 – it was not used by the outside world until the 1960s. “Frank Shaw was a customs officer in Liverpool docks,” Dr Crowley said. A northern Liverpudlian edition was compiled a few months later,” Tony added. While it may top the charts as the friendliest accent in the national linguistic survey, it has also often ranked as the most irritating one too, but Scousers don’t seem to care what other people make of it. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for more. Dr Cardoso adds: “A lot of people notice lenition, for example this is where the ‘k’ in a word like ‘back’ sounds more like an ‘h’, or more like the sound at the end of ‘loch’ in many Scottish varieties. Follow us on Twitter or Facebook for more. “More often than not, it’s vowels they play around with in accents, but it’s consonants in Scouse,” he said. Even though they are far flung from the confines of the city, St Helens, The Wirral, and Birkenhead all boast the Scouse accent and dialect, with subtle intonations re-purposed for the area.

“He knew a lot of dockers and got interested in the language of dock workers. an outcry from the north end of the city, in places like Bootle, who complained it was south-end Scouse. He identified the key problem being that traditional dialect research had focused on developments from a single proto-language, but Scouse (and many other urban dialects) had resulted from interactions between an unknown number of proto-languages. I don’t think I’ve ever been that happy in my entire life. The Scouse accent varies heavily even just a kilometre up the road, but there are some grounding rules on the way a Scouser pronounces their “ts”, “ks”, and “ds”.