Why cant we stand Scouse?

Michael Gilmour - 12SBS

J. Doyle - AS English Language

March 3, 2017

Intended Audience: readers of The Independents Opinion section.

Oh Liverpudlians, the natives of the famous port city, during the late 19th and
early 20th century, the birthplace of the famous rock group The Beatles, and the two
most average football clubs on earth (but thats another topic. While Liverpool has
given birth to revolutionary music, it lacks prestige in its accents. Liverpool English
(or Scouse), is one of the most distinctive and (to me, especially as an RP speaker)
irritating accents to listen to.
According to Woolaston, there is a social stigma and snobbery towards particular
regional accents. Even though accents can only have as much meaning as we place
on them, the various connotations and attitudes towards accents in England is an
important subject to study. In the landmark ITV study into accents, they found that
Scouse was relatively untrusted and had negative connotations felt towards it.
Liverpool English or Scouse is one of the most recognisable accents in the coun-
try, and arguably, the world. The Scouse accent is infamous for its harsh, nasal tones
and despite some similarities; it is distinctly different to the accents of the surround-
ing areas. The accent is widely known for its negative stereotypes that date back
to hundreds of years prior to the accents formation due to immigration of migrant
workers from eastern europe. Accentual variation is often most noticeable within
the vowels used in pronunciation, however with the scouse accent, both the vow-
els and the continents are affected by the accent. The Liverpudlian accent has been
heavily inuenced by the Irish accent, for example Liverpudlians tend to pronounce
the letter H and Haitch. The Liverpool accent also has many connotations of being
a lower prestige accent, and one that brings judgements of social class, wealth, and

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levels of education. There are also distinctive lexical variations such as lag for fake,
lad for man, Busy - chokker, and bifter for Cigarette.
One particular study that looked into sociolinguistics and the relationship be-
tween accents, was Dixon, Mahoney and Cocks (2002). Dixon et. al set out to nd
how the general public viewed of the Birmingham Accent and a Received Pronunci-
ation accent. Dixon et. al found that when a group of teenagers listened to a record-
ing of two policeman and were asked to rate their trustworthiness, the majority of
teenagers were more inclined to trust the policeman with the received pronunciation
accent. This can relate back to the perceptions of how Scouse is viewed by outsiders,
and further conrms both my view and the view of ITVs investigation that Scouse
is the least trustworthy and intelligent accent.
In contrast to the Scouse accent, is the Devon accent. In my opinion, even though
Im a londoner, I am more than inclined to agree with the data showing that the
Devon accent is the friendliest, as I nd that its difficult to take anyone seriously
with that accent.
However, even though I have a particular pride and preference for posh accents
like mine, and I have great disdain for the Scouse accent, I believe that its wrong to
explicitly demonstrate someone for their accent as many people in the dataset said
they were. As the world becomes more educated about sociolinguistics and linguis-
tics in general, accents like Scouse will became more and more accepted.