dhs93

In other words, will the accent of Liverpool, England ever change or disappear in the future? How would people from Liverpool possibly sound in the future (e.g. 10-25 years from now)? If it changes at all, how much would it change? How long would it take to change or disappear? Would migration of people not from Liverpool into the city change the scouse accent at all? If so, how much would the scouse accent change due to migration of "foreigners" into Liverpool?

I heard that the Beatles' and Cilla Black's scouse accents are slightly different than Steven Gerrard's and other younger people from Liverpool.

I know nobody knows for sure what will happen in the future. I just want to see people's predictions and opinions about the future of Liverpool's scouse accent.

The reason I ask is because I am really fascinated with the Liverpool accent.

alanRow

Scouse is a recent accent and didn't really become dominant in the area until the 1950s - many of the people you associate with Scouse had to learn how to speak it.

PatrickLondon

Accents do change over time (London and the Home Counties offer plenty of evidence over the last 30 years or so), so Scouse may well be no exception, depending on what sort of changes there are in demography, local media and so on. Some experts believe there are some aspects to accent (the way people hold their mouths, and so on) might even be influence by climate, so who knows what effect that has? My guess is that the adenoidal quality is a fundamental that won't change.

flanneruk

"Scouse is a recent accent and didn't really become dominant in the area until the 1950s"

...tells us more about the study of accents than about Scouse.

There's little seriously different between the dominant Merseyside accent of the early 1950s and today. And in the late 19th century, there were London jokes about the accents of William Gladstone (prime minister for much of the second half of te century) and FE Smith (Lord Brkenhead, an all round Establishment wheeler-dealer) pretty reminscent of today's anti-Scouse snobbery.

What happened in the 1950s was that an odd accent (much closer to the accents of Dublin and North Wales than to Liverpool's English hinterland) spread out to a much wider area of Cheshire and South Lancashire as slum clearance New Towns took the population of Liverpool 1-8 and Bootle, and the Wirral's workingclass enclaves, outside their narrow confines. Scouse is now the dominant voice of the area roughly bounded by the M57, M56 and M6.

Like all English regional accents, it's used with a wide variety of intensity. People who need to communicate a lot with the outside world (like Edwina Currie or Tesco's Terry Leahy) mostly retain a very light accent: those who don't will often take a pride in near-incomprehensibility to anyone else. The reason the famous 1950s comedians (the first cohort of Scouse speakers we've got lots of recordings of) have very light accents is that Ted Ray or Arthur Askey needed to be understandable by a national radio audience: the reason their contemporaneous actors (Rex Harrison or Anna Neagle) had no accent at all was that elocution lessons forced it out of them. I'm not aware of any serious history of Scouse Denial: the tendency of some upwardly mobile people to shed the accent. We know the great 19th century Liverpudlians generally didn't: it's generally claimed the late 19th century flyers to the Wirral did, and it's clear most of today's young thrusters don't, much.

The key changes today are that Scouse speakers retain traces of the accent far more than they once did on a national stage (the teenage Edwina Currie had no Scouse accent at all, Brian Epstein didn't either, whereas Bill Kenwright, who's practically a contemporary of Epstein's, most certainly does), and that the spreading of Scousery across a wider area of NW England has created a much wider spectrum of Scouse-ish accents. Aspirated dentals and difficulty in distinguishing 'fair' from 'fur' (much more the Scouse hallmarks than adenoids) now co-exist with an ever-wider range of speech idiosyncracies.

My bet is that, outside the socially marginalised, the Scouse of chainstore managers, policemen, teachers and callcentre workers (and most local politicians) will get ever lighter, while the fair/fur confusers will carry on spreading out. There's even a small cluster of us in the Cotswolds.

How long Hard Scouse continues to mark the isolationists (or remains a quirk some politicians and entertainers can exploit) is a different question. Sensible people don't go on screaming "I don't want to be understood" much after their midteens (or a few months in Walton Jail).

Universal pragmatism, however, isn't the first defining Liverpudlian characteristic most people would think of.

Padraig

Good stuff Flanner. I particularly like the last sentence.

I hadn't thought that there was much in common between the Scouse accent and that of my native Dublin, and I'm struggling to find echoes. I can link Scouse "lorra" with Dublin "lodda" with its softened "d" sound. Beyond that, I don't find a lorra connection.

[Why is Cilla Black talking into my imaginative ear?]

gwan

Interesting stuff flanner! My mum is a Scouser, but she's been in New Zealand since the 70s, and even she now struggles sometimes to understand them when we visit (they speak so fast!)

It may interest some of you to know that Southerners have been making fun of/disparaging Northern accents since at least the time of Chaucer. Chaucer imitates a Northern accent in the Reeve's Tale (one interesting feature is the Northerners use an -s ending on the third person singular, as we do, instead of the Southern -th: "he goes", not "he goeth"). John Trevisa, a contemporary of Chaucer, describes the North-Eastern accent, especially of York, as "so sharp, piercing, rasping and unshapely that we Southern men can hardly understand that language".

So there is a very long and (ig)noble tradition there!

willit

Accents are an interesting subject.

My elderly Uncle has a beautiful , Arlott like , Hampshire accent that has al but disappeared in Portsmouth and Southampton (To my ear at least). This seems to be replaced among the young by a sort of sub "East Enders"

My own accent is an abomination - Hampshire base tainted by several years as a child in Essex, and then a decade or so in South Africa.

zippo

All forms of speech change. Dialect always changes faster than other forms, as nobody teaches it or pampers it.

PatrickLondon

>>Universal pragmatism, however, isn't the first defining Liverpudlian characteristic most people would think of.<<

It's a measure of how clever Our Beloved Mayor™ (Boris) <i>isn't</i>, that he never thought to put it like that.

>>The reason the famous 1950s comedians (the first cohort of Scouse speakers we've got lots of recordings of) have very light accents is that Ted Ray or Arthur Askey needed to be understandable by a national radio audience<<

The fuss when Wilfred Pickles read the radio news in 1941 seems incomprehensible today (he's the second voice in this recording, and there's just the faintest trace of his native Yorkshire):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/realme...en_warnews.ram

But in those days the BBC had decided on a "national" voice (RP) as the norm; whereas when commercial TV was set up in the 1950s, it was on the basis of regional franchises, which tended to encourage regional voices and accents.

hetismij2

Gerrard has the miserable sounding Scouse accent, nothing to do with his age - just some sound miserable and some sound cheerful. I had friends from Liverpool as a youthette and some were sounded happy, like Cilla, and some sounded really miserable, like Gerrard. Nothing to do with how they were feeling, just subtleties in the accent from one part of the city to another. Just as you used to get in London before Estuary became universal.

flanneruk

"Gerrard has the miserable sounding Scouse accent,"

Gerrard doesn't need to communicate much: nor do most other sportsfolk. Alexei Sayle, or Macca, or Jimmy Tarbuck, or Cheri Blair, do.

PatrickLondon

Lily Savage communicated (and how!) while sounding miserable as sin; but perhaps coming from Birkenhead had something to do with it.

Rubicund

"Gerrard has the miserable sounding Scouse accent,"

Try and understand Jamie Carragher!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTJxocLDfEA

Nikki

To my knowledge, I have only met one Liverpudlian, and his accent did not jump out at me (nor did his lack of pragmatism). Guess I should have been listening harder.

flanneruk

"Lily Savage communicated (and how!) while sounding miserable as sin"

Ms Savage (RIP) may have spoken Hard Scouse: her alter ego , Paul O'Grady, speaks Scouse Lite. Still unreliable on the fair/fur thing, though - and those dentals remain aspirated.

PatrickLondon

>>and those dentals remain aspirated.<<

That's the NHS for you.

dhs93

Thanks for all your responses. They are really interesting!!