of Scouse and Scousiness

Just had the following appear in the northern Big Issue. It's a quick prod at the current state of the Scouse language, featuring an interview with the editor of a major tome on the subject. It's a feisty little article, bursting with irrepressible anti-authoritarian cheek and full of quips. You'll love it. if you don't love it I'm going to sulk till I get a public apology.

Over at Liverpool’s City of Culture website it’s Doddy front and centre, as the city’s patron saint of tickling stick related comedy rolls out a celebration of Liverpool laugh makers past and present. Elsewhere, organisers promise hundreds of events designed to “reflect the city’s edgy spirit and sense of fun.”

The anthropologist Benedict Anderson once described nations as imagined communities. And if you really want to understand how the nation of Liverpool imagines itself and how it is understood by everybody else, then the thing to do is study the national language.

The Mersey Sound does just that. A collective effort by linguists and academics at Edge Hill University, the book is the first scientific study of the Scouse tongue: where it came from, how it’s changing, what it says about the people who speak it.

This isn’t one of those collections of anecdotes and slang like Fritz Spiegel’s Lern Yerself Scouse; though the sheer linguistic inventiveness of Scouse and its speakers is one of the most important factors putting Liverpool on the national and international map. Whatever people think of Scouse, they know it when they hear it.

“Scouse owes a lot of its inventiveness to the Irish influence “says Dr Clive Grey, Lecturer in English Language at Edge Hill and contributor and co-editor to The Mersey Sound. “Not just in the dialect itself, but in the importance placed on having the gift of the gab – on the pursuit of snappiness, as they say. “

So a wave of Irish migration in the 19th century eventually, through the medium of Brookside, leads to people in Shetland and Surrey phoning the bizzies and buying crimbo presents. It shows how central language can be to a city’s development and perception by outsiders.

The Irish influence on Scouse is well-known, but it’s only half the story says Clive Grey. “There’s also the influence of Welsh English – and of Welsh – and of various South Lancashire dialects that the city absorbed as it expanded.

You can think of it as a sort of division of labour. Scouse consonants are Irish, but Scouse vowels show the Welsh character.” In addition, there are various terms taken from across the world, as the world came across the port of Liverpool: the word Scouse itself was originally Norwegian.

What is Scouse, technically speaking? Reaching deep into linguistic jargon, the authors of The Mersey Sound describe the dialect as if it was a collection of unencountered Amazonian tribes, the land of the dental fricatives and emboldened plosives.

Four main characteristics are highlighted: TH stopping – dat dere TH stopping; non rhoticity, which means that the letter r is only pronounced in a word if it is followed by a vowel; the “nurse-square” comparison, with the vowels in both being identical; and lenition, a process which leads to heavy emphasis on the c in crime and the d and p in deep, amongst other words.

Scouse is also what linguists call a “koine”, a form of language that has come together from a variety of different places, rather than evolved over time from one source. Amongst other things, that means that within basic limits like those outlined above there are many different variants. It’s a language that people constantly re-invent.

“A lot of what you’d think of as ‘classic scouse’ is falling out of use” says Clive Grey. “The long double o in look and book for instance is not something you hear younger people saying much now. But the ‘catarrh consonant’ in words that begin with ch seems to be much more pronounced.” Do you want chhhhicken with that?

According to conventional wisdom, regional accents and dialects are supposed to be in irreversible decline, replaced in the South by estuary English and in the North by a kind of basic Northern, reflecting the original divide between Old Norse and Anglo Saxon speakers. It’s as though under the pressure of 21st century communications, northerners are seeking their inner Viking.

That may be true outside the big cities, but within them linguists have found that dialects are both growing stronger and increasing in speakers.

“This is partly because of postwar slum clearance programmes in Liverpool, and people moving out to places like Knowsley, Skelmersdale and Speke” says Clive Grey. “Instead of losing their dialect, or seeing it merge with Lancashire speech, people clung on to it, and have clung on to it more over time. The Scouse spoken in the new towns is often stronger than in the traditional heartlands.”

That in turn may reflect the failure of the new towns policy on Merseyside amid the collapse of traditional employment. In the absence of anything more substantial people cling to their identity all the more strongly. But that’s not the whole story.

“If you go up to places like Prescot and up the Ribble Valley you find that the local speech is far more Scouse than before, and that’s also true in Halton, Chester, and over into Wales as far as places like Buckley. It’s a kind of Scouse imperialism, almost.”

Clive Grey also attributes the strength of Scouse to the city’s ongoing and persistent rivalry with Manchester. The two are coming closer. In West Lancashire, Wigan flies the flag for native Lancashire speech against the encroaching legions: Scousers from the West, Mancunians from the East.

Perhaps in the age of Tesco Towns and endless suburbs there’s a strong desire to come from somewhere real, with a strong identity; even if this identity often isn’t much respected elsewhere. The image of Scousers over the years seems to have undergone a change: all round entertainers in the sixties and seventies, plucky underdogs in the eighties: self-pitying moaners, always demanding an apology for something in more recent years.

“If you look at surveys of the way people rate accents, Scouse has always suffered from a lack of prestige” says Clive Grey. “But that just contributes to an ‘us against the world’ mentality. It creates a very strong sense of community and that helps ensure that Scouse survives.”

Changing perceptions like these what projects like City of Culture are about. Yet trying to bootstrap a city into economic growth simply through self expression is a tricky act to pull off. How do you market the city’s traditions without falling into the dead end of heritage economics? How can you build on that heritage while showing that the city has something new to offer?

The sheer persistence of the Scouse tongue offers a kind of answer. Think of it as a verbal CV, suggesting that its owner is sharp witted, independent minded and sceptical of authority: these are not bad qualities to have in economically uncertain times. It’s a way of expressing a vote of confidence in your own adaptability and resilience. Whatever happens during Liverpool’s year as a cultural showcase, one thing is clear: The people have spoken.

Comments

[dsquared]

custi, Jamie la. I think this achhhademic is a bit of a beaut, frankly, though some of his points are sound. The long OO in "look" was never universal to Scouseland - I have a link on CT to a radio file of Billy Butler taking the piss out of a phone-in contestant who used it. And the catarrh consonant is simply a Welsh "ch". On the other hand, at my uncle's funeral in December, I definitely noticed that St Helens (which was absolutely Lancashire twenty years ago and still had residual bitterness toward the Royal Mail for amalgamating them into the Merseyside postal district) had got a lot more Scouse. You're right about the economics though - I can think of more than a dozen financial Scousers (they often mistake me for a brother due to my upbringing in Llandudno), which is a lot more than any other non-Scottish, non-Southern city.

[jamie]

I'm a devotee of the long oo myself: it's the classic identifier of Potteries dialect and pretty much the only thing left I have of it. But then we had a lot of Welsh immigrants too. I used to get mistaken for a Scouser quite a lot, which is especially irritating when you're living in London and Southerners are doing it, and it was always becuase I didn't pronounce book to ryhme with duck (owrate duck?). Maybe the catarrh consonant is generally Celtic: one of those areas where P and Q speakers didn't diverge.

[Phil]

Up here the long oo is one of the indicators that you hail from the backwoods of Chorley rather than the bright lights of Preston or Blackburn. Smaller Lancs towns in general seem to have some very pronounced accents - you should hear how they talk in Horwich - but Chorley is out on its own.

Shouldn't it be chickhhhen, not chhhhicken? I'm not convinced that is a Welsh 'ch', either - the way I learned it, Welsh 'ch' is formed in the middle of the mouth, closer to the German 'ch' in 'ich' than the one in 'ach'. (Admittedly, I learned the language in South Wales.)

But I doubt the long oo was the crucial factor for you. Anyone from North of Birmingham and South of Newcastle is liable to get mistaken from a Scouser down South - Brummie, Scouser, Geordie, that's pretty much all they can hear. I used to know a Stretford bloke who taught in a school in London; he got the Harry Enfield Terry-and-Barry routine from the kids all the time. Sometimes corporal punishment doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

What's this 'la' business, anyway? I've lived up here 25 years, I've been to Liverpool plenty of times, I used to watch Brookside regularly, and I've never heard anyone say 'la'.

[jamie]

The only people I've heard say "la" are Singaporean.

[Phil]

Oh - words beginning with ch. Nope, don't know what he's talking about.

Did you come across a linguist's term for the 'warrior' effect, where a T weakens to a D and then to a flapped R (as in "Warrior wanna make those eyes at me for...")?

[dsquared]

Phil's right about the "ch" replacing a hard c. (god, the thought of all those scousers hanging round talking about "fricatives"), but it's a North Welsh ch for definite - I'd pronounce the "bach" in "sospan bach" as a scouser would pronounce "back".

No, I've heard "la" a fair bit (although it is a bit dated I think, presumably roughly as past tense as The La's). If you're local you probably just hear it as "lad" but that final consonant does disappear a bit and the short a is stretched.

The one that always did for me was "come 'ed". I realised it was "come ahead" about last week.

[dsquared]

[Did you come across a linguist's term for the 'warrior' effect, where a T weakens to a D and then to a flapped R (as in "Warrior wanna make those eyes at me for...")? ]

I think that the research into this important subject was carried out by Darrell Doo.

[jamie]

"But I doubt the long oo was the crucial factor for you"

i think it was. People used to shout "look at the cookery book" at me in the strets of Walthamstow.

[Phil]

That's what you call mean streets.

[ejh]

I tend to think that Celtic, Barcelona, Newcastle and Liverpool should play an annual tournament to determine which set of fans are the most fond of themselves.