Scouse Spoken Here, So Bring a Sensa Yuma

[Anthea Fraser Gupta]

One just never knows what the academics have said and what the
journalists have put into their mouths, but....

> While most regional accents in England are growing a touch
> less pronounced in this age of high-speed travel and
> 600-channel satellite systems, it seems that the Liverpool
> accent is boldly growing thicker.

There is not a great deal of evidence for either of the propositions
here. Regional accents are alive and well in England. There is no
evidence that the Liverpool accent is 'thicker' than it was (and how
would this be measured???).

Kevin Watson is quoted in the Liverpool Echo as follows:

-----------------

Linguistics expert Kevin Watson, who has been studying changes in the
accent, has discovered that, not only has it resisted the national trend
of levelling out, it is actually becoming even more distinct.

He says: "Scouse is becoming Scouser.

"While certain features traditionally found in southern English accents
are starting to creep into northern ones, there has been a general
resistance in the Scouse accent."

There are a few southern features which are starting to form part of the
Liverpool accent however, including using a "f" or "v" sound instead of
"th", as in "brother" to "bruvver" and "bath" to "baf".

According to Mr Watson, who speaks with a slight Liverpool accent
himself, Scouse is unusual because it traditionally contains a mixture
of both northern and southern traits. Like other people in the North,
Liverpudlians pronounce the words "cut" and "foot" as if they rhyme,
they say "bath" with the same vowel sound as "cat" and not "calm" as in
the South.

----------------------------

There are two views current in British dialectology. One is that
features associated with London English (such as 'th-fronting') are
spreading to new areas. The other is that many of these supposedly
London features have been in these areas for a long time, often
centuries, and that the identification of them as 'London' isn't based
on firm historical work.  Watson appears to be taking this view. The
simple north/south dimension here is not a very helpful one: accents
change gradually.

>"> The Liverpool accent, first made famous by the Beatles, who
> brandished both the urban and suburban variety, is a mishmash
> of Welsh intonations, Irish lilts and Lancashire twangs. "

Seems unlikely Watson said this. 'Mishmash' isn't a nice word -- does
this suggest there are pure dialects out there somewhere? Also "the
Scouse accent is muffled within the sinuses" is the usual thing said
about accents people don't like (lots of British people refer to
American accents as 'nasal' without any phonetic grounds for this!).

>Scouse (rhymes with blouse)

No -- it rhymes with 'mouse' (ends with /s/, not /z/).

>The letter T is commonly
> dropped from endings so the word "what" sounds like "wha."
> The word "cut" mysteriously rhymes with "foot."

Realising  final /t/ as a glottal stop is common in a lot of accents of
English, including most British ones. It's obviously the journalist and
NOT Watson who thinks it's mysterious that 'cut' rhymes with 'foot'.  As
far as I know all the US accents have inherited the new pattern of
distinction, but many accents of the north of England retain the older
distribution.

> That said, the curator of English accents and dialects at the
> British Library said the Northeast accents, from places like
> Northumberland and Tyneside, were also going stronger.

Did he really say this??? This would be Jonathan Robinson. See
http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/collections/dialects/.

> Accents in Britain, particularly in England, are a timeless
> obsession.

That's true...

> They have long separated the miner from the
> minister and the more genteel south from the gritty
> industrial north. But as the class structure here loosens,
> regional accents, at least moderate ones, are leaping class
> boundaries, a trend picked up on and accelerated by television.

Genteel south and gritty industrial north!!!!!!!! Grrrrrrrr. <bares
teeth, hisses, and gets claws out]. Spare us the stereotypes!  Does the
London docker have a genteel image? What about rural Cumbria -- not very
gritty or industrial! There were, and are, regional accents in the North
as well as in the South (Pyymalion was set in London, after all). There
are regional accents in Bristol as well as in Newcastle. What has
happened in recent year is ONLY that in the last 10 or so years the BBC
has started using presenters with high-prestige regional accents rather
than just those with RP accents. This is not a very major change. There
never was a time when all teachers and priests/vicars/ministers spoke
RP. Though I think an RP-speaking miner (except during the 39-45 war)
would have been a rarity!

> The rise of the Labor Party, with its working-class roots,
> has also helped chip away at the accent barrier. Prime
> Minister Tony Blair has been known to dip into "Estuary
> English," a hybrid accent with Cockney inflections, as the
> political situation requires.

He's the most RP-speaking Prime Minister we've had for a long time
(despite his roots in Scotland and the north-east of England)!  Harold
Wilson spoke with a definite Yorkshire accent in the 1960s. The current
leader of the Conservative party has a Welsh accent and the leader of
the Liberal Democrats a Scottish one. This accent boundary is a bit of a
myth (unless you wanted to be a BBC announcer).

> Despite all this cross-switching, accent discrimination still
> abounds; it is just more subtle. As Kate Fox wrote in a study
> last year, "Watching the English," "All English people are
> fitted with a sort of social Global Positioning Satellite
> that tells us a person's position on the class map as soon as
> he or she begins to speak."

There's some truth in this. But the thing to understand is that it's a
positioning rather than a simple pecking order.

> Scouse accents routinely rank among the most stigmatized.
> Last year, the Aziz Corporation, an executive communications
> consulting company, surveyed a wide variety of accents for
> their appeal to businesses. The consulting group asked
> directors from 100 companies to rate the accents. Scottish
> accents scored the highest; they connoted honesty and
> reliability. The Scouse accent scored lowest: only 15 percent
> of the respondents believed that a Liverpool accent denoted
> success; about 9 percent said the accent conjured a
> hardworking, reliable person; and only 8 percent viewed the
> speaker as honest and trustworthy.

It's very difficult to assess results like this, especially as most of
them do not involve playing recordings. Instead they more often ask
respondents to imagine a speaker of the accent. For some reason people
might imagine a Scottish accents something like Sean Connery's, but
might imagine a Liverpool accent associated with a completely different
social image. More valid results would be obtained by comparing real
speakers so that (for example) a high prestige Liverpool accent was
compared with a high prestige Glasgow accent.

And stereotypes are dangerous...

Well, that's made me feel a lot better.

Anthea (not a Scouse, by the way)

*     *     *     *     *
Anthea Fraser Gupta (Dr)
School of English, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT
<www.leeds.ac.uk/english/staff/afg>
NB: Reply to a.f.gupta at leeds.ac.uk
*     *     *     *     *


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu
> [mailto:owner-lgpolicy-list at ccat.sas.upenn.edu] On Behalf Of
> Harold F. Schiffman
> Sent: 15 March 2005 18:59
> To: Language Policy-List
> Subject: Scouse Spoken Here, So Bring a Sensa Yuma
>
>
> >From the NYTimes, March 15, 2005
> LIVERPOOL JOURNAL
>
> Baffling Scouse Is Spoken Here, So Bring a Sensa Yuma
> By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
>
> LIVERPOOL, England - Shortly after Rafael Benitez, a
> Spaniard, took over as coach of the Liverpool soccer team
> last year, he gushed about this northern city's spirit and
> congeniality, before acknowledging sheepishly that he had
> encountered one complication. "I can't understand your
> accent," he told reporters here. "It sounds like Russian."
> While most regional accents in England are growing a touch
> less pronounced in this age of high-speed travel and
> 600-channel satellite systems, it seems that the Liverpool
> accent is boldly growing thicker. "Scouse," said Kevin
> Watson, a Lancaster University linguistics professor, using
> the colloquial term for the Liverpudlian accent, "is getting scouser."
>
> The Liverpool accent, first made famous by the Beatles, who
> brandished both the urban and suburban variety, is a mishmash
> of Welsh intonations, Irish lilts and Lancashire twangs.
> Wales and Lancashire abut Liverpool, and Ireland is just a
> jump across the Irish Sea. During its lean years Ireland sent
> large numbers of immigrants to this once huge port city. To a
> newcomer here, Scouse (rhymes with blouse) can seem as
> impenetrable as a game of cricket. The letter T is commonly
> dropped from endings so the word "what" sounds like "wha."
> The word "cut" mysteriously rhymes with "foot." Elizabeth
> Taylor has the ring of "He lispeth sailor," wrote Brian
> Minard in his book, "Lern Yerself Scouse. Wersia Sensa Yuma?"
> "Sid Samsonite?" translates roughly into "Are you going to
> see Sam tonight?"  While "Nabisco" is not a maker of a
> cookie; it's a command to steal someone's coat.
>
> Adding to that, the Scouse accent is muffled within the
> sinuses, a feature some linguists attribute to the effect
> that coal burning had on the nasal passages during the city's
> industrial period. Mix in a few choice Scouse phrases and
> comprehension dips absurdly, as Mr.  Benitez quickly
> discovered on arriving here. A quick look through Mr.
> Minard's old (1972) but still reliable guide, offers up a
> digestible selection of Liverpool terms. "Giv us me caardz,"
> translates into "I have no desire to work here any longer."
> Mr. Minard notes that this is "an excellent example of how
> Scouse can use both plural and singular in the same sentence
> to mean exactly the same thing." "She caahn aahf jangle,"
> means "That woman is rather garrulous." The police are "the
> busys" and a sandwich is a "butty." Milk is "moo."
>
> In his research, Mr. Watson compared recordings of young
> people from the 1970's with the way people speak today and
> concluded that Liverpool was doing an excellent job fending
> off the encroachment of southern accents, including the
> powerful Cockney influence from London. The migrating London
> accents are blamed for the slight changes in regional accents
> over the past few decades. "There are things happening in
> Liverpool that don't happen anywhere else,"  Mr. Watson said.
> That said, the curator of English accents and dialects at the
> British Library said the Northeast accents, from places like
> Northumberland and Tyneside, were also going stronger.
>
> Tracking accents and deconstructing how they change over
> time, particularly from one region to another, have proved
> tricky for linguists, because there are so many accents in
> Britain. With that in mind, the British Library has
> catalogued hundreds of hours of recordings in a sound
> archive, an invaluable tool for researchers. The BBC has also
> begun its own project, with the University of Leeds, to
> record the voices of 1,000 people, analyze the accents and
> delve into the attitudes accents elicit.
>
> Accents in Britain, particularly in England, are a timeless
> obsession. They have long separated the miner from the
> minister and the more genteel south from the gritty
> industrial north. But as the class structure here loosens,
> regional accents, at least moderate ones, are leaping class
> boundaries, a trend picked up on and accelerated by television.
>
> The BBC, in an appeal to younger viewers, or just plain more
> viewers, has shown a marked interest in promoting regional
> accents on its television programs and news shows. "The BBC
> has a conscious policy of becoming more democratic and
> accepting a wider ranger of accents," said John Wells,
> professor of phonetics at University College London. "They
> have discouraged the use of what they feel to be too rigid
> 'Received Pronunciation,' " the English of the "educated"
> classes, and traditionally the BBC.
>
> The rise of the Labor Party, with its working-class roots,
> has also helped chip away at the accent barrier. Prime
> Minister Tony Blair has been known to dip into "Estuary
> English," a hybrid accent with Cockney inflections, as the
> political situation requires.
>
> Despite all this cross-switching, accent discrimination still
> abounds; it is just more subtle. As Kate Fox wrote in a study
> last year, "Watching the English," "All English people are
> fitted with a sort of social Global Positioning Satellite
> that tells us a person's position on the class map as soon as
> he or she begins to speak."
>
> Scouse accents routinely rank among the most stigmatized.
> Last year, the Aziz Corporation, an executive communications
> consulting company, surveyed a wide variety of accents for
> their appeal to businesses. The consulting group asked
> directors from 100 companies to rate the accents. Scottish
> accents scored the highest; they connoted honesty and
> reliability. The Scouse accent scored lowest: only 15 percent
> of the respondents believed that a Liverpool accent denoted
> success; about 9 percent said the accent conjured a
> hardworking, reliable person; and only 8 percent viewed the
> speaker as honest and trustworthy.
>
> "People who wouldn't dream about judging on color of skin or
> gender would comment on accents, sometimes very rudely,"
> observed Dr. Clive Upton, a linguist at Leeds University, who
> is involved in the BBC project, which also surveyed speakers
> on their attitudes.
>
> Liverpool has long been perceived as a town of charming
> hooligans - people eager to pick your wallet while whispering
> an off-color joke in your ear. But Liverpudlians take pride
> in their accents, in being Scousers (as they are called), and
> they are quick to spill their own jokes about their supposed
> criminal tendencies, their backward ways and their
> incorrigible accents.
>
> "We're from Liverpool here," said Bill Costello, 48, a
> manager for a timber company, over a pint at a pub called
> Goose at the Queens, in the heart of Liverpool, when asked
> about Liverpool's stubborn accent. "We don't know about
> vowels and consonants. Well, only vowels."
>
> To which his friend, John Lee, added only, "Are you from the welfare?"
>
>
>
> Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/15/international/europe/15liver
pool.html?oref=login