The idea of a Scouse accent for many people from outside the city is rooted in prominent 20th century examples like The Beatles and TV dramas like ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’. However, what you hear on the streets of Liverpool in the 21st century is markedly different, with many believing that a new variation of the Scouse accent has developed.
In order to find out if the accent has changed, we spoke to Liverpool-born Professor Tony Crowley. Tony has written extensively about Scouse - or Liverpool English as he refers to it. His books include the ‘Liverpool English Dictionary’, ‘Scouse: A Social and Cultural History’ and, most recently, his 2023 work ‘Liverpool: A Memoir of Words’.
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Firstly, Tony argues that our accent doesn’t come from where people may think. The accepted wisdom is that Scouse is a combination of the Lancashire and Irish accents, driven by mass immigration to the city from the Emerald Isle during the Irish famine.
That theory was notably promoted by docker, councillor and ECHO columnist Frank Shaw in the first half of the 20th century. However, Tony’s argument is different. He told the ECHO: "Liverpool was an immigrant city in the 19th century. In the 1861 census, half the population were immigrants which was an amazing thing.
“There wasn’t anywhere else like it in Britain - not even London. All of these people mixed together and linguists say that new dialects come from language contract - all of these different people mixing, speaking different languages and different dialects. My argument is that’s where Scouse came from.”
"I grew up with Frank Shaw’s story, which I liked and my dad loved. Frank Shaw was Catholic and was Liverpool Irish.
“He wanted to put the Irish back into Liverpool history. In the '50s, Liverpool was still a very sectarian city. He puts the Irish back into Liverpool - it’s a great story but it just happens to be wrong. Sometimes the best stories aren’t true.”
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Tony explained: "In the Second World War, a Liverpool accent appeared on radio for the first time - it was Tommy Handley, the Dingle comedian, in a series called ‘It’s That Man Again’. That’s really fascinating. Tommy Handley has a very distinctive Liverpool accent. But there’s very little evidence from the 1930s right up to the '50s of what people from Liverpool sounded like.
"Then The Beatles came along and they did have a south end accent - the north end accent was very different. My dad used to say the north end was a different place and people spoke differently.
"Frank Shaw wrote the first volume of ‘Lern Yerself Scouse’ - that was published in 1966. It was published for all the tourists coming to Liverpool for the World Cup games at Goodison.
"They apparently needed a guidebook to Liverpool English, that was how they sold it. It was really well received and it was reviewed by the Times Literary Supplement. But there was uproar in Liverpool because people from the north end said ‘this is south end Scouse’. It was not north end Scouse.
“I tell my students about this and I remember one of my students asking me ‘how big is Liverpool geographically?’. I said it was about seven miles from the north end to the south end, but they looked at me like it couldn’t possibly be the case that north end Scouse and south end Scouse could be so different. The second volume of ‘Lern Yerself Scouse’ was about Bootle Scouse, specifically about that.”
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He said: "I think the Scouse accent has changed now. Partly because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that we are Scouse and not English -as Liverpool has become much more of a distinctive identity and also a confident distinctive identity since the '80s.
"When you get the regeneration of Liverpool and it becomes much more confident as a city, you see that people - particularly the younger generation - use it as a way of marking themselves out as being really distinctive.
"There’s an argument that Scouse has become much more Scouse over the past 20 years. If you look at recordings of kids today and of kids from 20 years ago, there are certain features of Scouse which have become stronger.
“I think that’s to do with a sense of identity and a sense of coming from Liverpool. That’s always there, but I think the self-consciousness of that comes from the last 30 years or so.”
Firstly, Tony argues that our accent doesn’t come from where people may think. The accepted wisdom is that Scouse is a combination of the Lancashire and Irish accents, driven by mass immigration to the city from the Emerald Isle during the Irish famine.
That theory was notably promoted by docker, councillor and ECHO columnist Frank Shaw in the first half of the 20th century. However, Tony’s argument is different. He told the ECHO: "Liverpool was an immigrant city in the 19th century. In the 1861 census, half the population were immigrants which was an amazing thing.
“There wasn’t anywhere else like it in Britain - not even London. All of these people mixed together and linguists say that new dialects come from language contract - all of these different people mixing, speaking different languages and different dialects. My argument is that’s where Scouse came from.”
Bit of an odd argument as most of those immigrants were from Ireland, so it’s not wrong to say it’s largely a collision of Irish and Lancashire accents but it is also more nuanced than that, which is what separates Scousers from Mancs (which is also a mix of Lancashire and Irish but with more of a Pennines influence). So there is some influence from Scandinavia (that’s where the dish scouse comes from after all), as well as all the others but Irish is clearly the root of a lot of the distinctive features in Scouse, like the pronunciation of “th”.
I also saw a documentary that suggested dialects based around docks tended to be pitched higher and spoken faster - you can see this by comparing Scouse to Cockney.
So there’s a lot going on but to say Shaw was “wrong” seems odd.