Scouse Phonology and Where it Came From

there may well be teenagers in here tonight i don't know it's a difficult thing being a teenager and if you're a teenager in here tonight you probably don't realize how much of a you are most of the time this is a niche but overdue video about um the scouse dialect which is spoken in the liverpool merseyside areas in what some people would call northwestern england what some people would call the northwest midlands and scouse is a very unusual dialect within its situation so you have the the traditional cheshire dialect continuum the traditional lancashire dialect continuum then you have scouse in the middle which is it has resemblances to the southern lancashire dialect continuum but it's very unusual within that area so this video is kind of going to be a dissection of what exactly makes scouse different and then maybe a little amusing into why it might be different in the ways that it is first of all we'll go through some aspects of scouse pronunciation that are connected to more traditional language features i'll use some linguistics terminology but i'll try and define things on the screen so that people can sort of read along um you have a usual characteristically northern english thing which is that the vowels in foot and strut haven't split away from each other so words like cut put and gutter all have the same stressed vowel and the quality is probably something like oh although that will depend on the speaker a more regional northwestern feature is the square nurse merger which makes the vowels in the words square and nurse identical and this can be found in a lot of places in lancashire and the merge quality tends to be closer generally to what the nurse vowel is in dialects without the merger so squir nurse in scouse the end quality can also be closer to what would normally be the square vowel so nais square and this merger generally causes the words fair and fur to be pronounced identically either as fur fur or as fair fair or something in between and finally in common with a lot of northern dialects for most speakers the sound is always followed by a g so sing thing instead of difficult thing um this was how things worked in old and middle english was just an allophonic pronunciation of na when it appeared before a girl so that i i think that's probably a continuation and that that happens in manchester and other parts of the northwest as well some aspects of the scouse vowel system differ a lot depending on the speaker and exactly where they come from and also sometimes on what age they are so for example the vowel in the word star generally has the tongue low as it does in most english dialects but it could be pronounced with the tongue low and quite forward in the mouth stat or with the tongue low and quite backwards in the mouth start and again that'll depend on the speaker so what about this vowel system is different from what you might expect of a lancashire dialect bearing in mind liverpool was in lancashire until not that long ago a few key differences come out when you look at the diphthongs the vowels that glide from one quality to another for one thing the face and goat vowels are diphthongs in scouse whereas in in the rest of lancashire there'd be monophthongs in most cases something along the lines of face go you can hear the tongue and lips stay pretty much in the same place the whole time you're pronouncing the vowel in scouse they tend to be narrow raising diphthongs so the tongue gets slightly higher in the mouth while you're saying the vowel face gold the goat vowel has a lot of variation around liverpool so it might be more backed gold or it might start more centrally in the mouth goat the goose diphthong is also different throughout a lot of lancashire all the speakers are more likely to say something like goose goose but in scouse it's more likely to be goose goose and finally scouse has the two weak vowels merged in unstressed positions so that chicken and sicken rhymes something like chicken sicken the consonants stand out in a number of ways as well so scouse is completely non-rhotic which means the r sound is only pronounced normally if a vowel comes straight afterwards so it's pronounced in red grit orange but not in car butter nes and this is true of the majority of dialects across england these days but strangely enough lancashire is one of the few places that roticity has held on you could reasonably expect scouse english to be rhotic and to pronounce the in all these positions but it doesn't and traditionally that r sound is an alveolar tap or very occasionally i think a trill plosive consonants in scales are very often affricated so a normal plosive you obstruct some part of your vocal tract air builds up behind the obstruction and then you release that air in a burst but when plosives get affricated you partly release that obstruction but you keep the vocal tract closed enough that there's some friction as the air comes out so some examples of affricates are cha it's a plosive released into a fricative cha cha the most commonly affricated plosives in scouts as far as i know are ca i've previously transcribed scouse tu as a but transcriptions i've seen by people who know a lot more about scouts than i ever will tend to have it released into a voiceless alveolar fricative which actually sounds right now that i listen back to it in here tonight in here tonight in here tonight and k tends to get released into a velar fricative although i'm sure i've heard some speakers release it into some kind of uvular sound as well to look in the mirror to look in the mirror to look in the mirror at the ends of words in certain situations ta can be united to the point that it's pronounced as ha so the words it and what might be pronounced listen to how john bishop says it in this recording he said then we come and get it he said then we come and get it he said then we come and get it and finally non-speakers of scouts might hear the and the as if they were pronounced da it might sound like the has merged with tur and the has merged with the but in reality for a lot of speakers that distinction is still maintained it's just not maintained in a way that's easy to hear if you don't speak the dialect thir and the become dental plosives with the tip of the tongue against the backs of the front teeth whereas stay alveolar sounds as they are in most dialects and as i've just said they are often affricated what are you doing with that monument what are you doing with that monuments what are you doing with that monuments so why does scouse have all of these regionally unusual features well like a lot of urban dialects a huge amount of this change is probably a result of immigration of people from different sort of dialect areas especially irish people in this case there's a 2007 paper which i'll link in the description it references an earlier bit of research that combs through all the literature trying to find references to a specific distinctive liverpool dialect and the idea of that was that at some point in the past liverpudlians must have spoken a dialect that was more in line with other lancashire dialects of course it would always have had its own regional features but they wouldn't have been as unusual as they are now until a period of outside influence produced a really distinctive liverpool dialect that was the ancestor of the scouts we hear today the researcher mentions a text from 1830 where two liver puddling characters speak with a lot of common language features that aren't common anymore in modern scouse and that suggests that 1830 might have been some kind of pre-scouse point in time and then by 1889 people are making references to a liverpool and birkenhead dialect which is noticeably different to those around it although texts from the time don't reference any specific features as far as i know and unfortunately recordings of scouse don't go that far back as the more recent researcher points out this mid 19th century period is exactly when we see a population boom in liverpool because of people coming from other places especially ireland but also i think parts of scotland and many of these features we've gone through really strongly support that idea so a lot of variants of irish english famously pronounced which are worth thousands of euro thousands of euro thousands of euro an affrication of consonants like is also really common throughout a lot of ireland there's a lot less of that there's a lot less of that there's a lot less of that i'm not too concerned about the vowel differences because vowels are a lot more plastic and they tend to change a bit more readily than consonants do but i think across a lot of ireland speakers also have the the the weak vowel merger that causes chicken and sicken to rhyme chickens sicken so that may also be a result of irish influence or there might just be an internal development the slightly surprising thing which is highlighted by this 2007 study is the fact that scouse is non-rhotic like i said before so an r sound isn't pronounced normally unless a vowel comes after it traditional lancashire english and irish english and scottish english all tend to be rhotic and in the 19th century a lot of northern english dialects seem to be rhotic even outside of lancashire so it seems surprising that non-roticity has won out in this situation um and you could you could explain this in a number of ways but it's hard to gather evidence for any of them in particular what i will say is that i know there is some evidence for non-roticity in lancashire in the early 1800s even in places where rotisserie now exists so in preston which is 30 miles north of liverpool where i go to university you can learn a lot about this rotisserie thing through the kinds of spelling mistakes that people made in old letters some letters that i'll cite in the description show us that the people writing them couldn't tell the difference between words that normally have in certain positions and words that don't so brother and four are spelt without an r father and petitions are spelled with one and the affected r's are in exactly the positions you'd expect are to be deleted in non-rhotic dialects so this suggests that maybe the people writing these letters aren't pronouncing these r's and so they can't tell where they're supposed to go in spelling and bear in mind that rotaticity does exist in preston nowadays even among some younger speakers so it's a very volatile thing so i wouldn't be too surprised if non-rotaticity was a thing in liverpool even before the scouse dialect developed and that maybe it's just survived to the present day although that's something that's very hard to prove without more spelling evidence um i hope this video has been a bit of fun for those of you who are interested in that kind of dialect and for those of you who aren't sorry for the nicheness of it i'm going to be doing a couple of collaborations um probably over the next few weeks one with caroline cypronovska about cognition and universal grammar and then another one with jackson crawford about colour terms and old norse which he's very kindly agreed to talk about um i i realize not everybody's into collaborations but hopefully i i think they're very interesting so um hopefully other people agree um and after that i will do probably something on the great vowel shift in northern england so if anyone has any specific questions about that um they can put those in the comments and i'll try and get around to answering some of them in that video so thank you very much indeed for watching and i will talk to you soon

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 87,320

Keywords: scouse, liverpool, birkenhead, merseyside, dialects, historical linguistics, phonology, phonetics, pronunciation

Id: b8X4xKIppS8

Length: 11min 46sec (706 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/reptilian-space-pope]

Good effort lad.

I'd love to her more about how different cultures coming to Liverpool shaped our accents and the idiosyncrasies between Scouse and Wool accents.

[u/aethelberga]

This guy has the most fascinating channel, if you like language.

[u/danger0usd1sc0]

Having lived in Liverpool, Wirral, London and Scotland, I find that I have picked up bits of my accent and sentence structure from all over.

It isn't just how you pronounce words that gives you your dialectcal identity, but also your choice of words.

eg in the tiny part of Scotland where I lived, "that trees" would be preferable to "those trees" - "trees" being a singular entity for a group of trees, therefore "that", not "those"

the "d" for "th" is very strong with me. It's deffo "de Asda" and not "The Asda".

One thing that strikes me is the accentuation of a terminal "G" that (not-really-a-scouser) John Bishop uses. "SayinG" with a hard "g", instead of dropping it all together - "sayin'"

[u/PurpleBinHead]

A video about scouse and the first example is a wool.

Nah, enjoyed that!