Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface Liverpool: language, culture and history
- 1 The sea, slavery and strangers: observations on the making of early modern Liverpool and its culture
- 2 Language in Liverpool: the received history and an alternative thesis
- 3 Language and a sense of place: the beginnings of ‘Scouse’
- 4 Frank Shaw and the founding of the ‘Scouse industry’
- 5 What is ‘Scouse’? Historical and theoretical issues
- 6 Liverpools: places, histories, differences
- Appendix. Stories of words: naming the place, naming the people
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Language and a sense of place: the beginnings of ‘Scouse’
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Preface Liverpool: language, culture and history
- 1 The sea, slavery and strangers: observations on the making of early modern Liverpool and its culture
- 2 Language in Liverpool: the received history and an alternative thesis
- 3 Language and a sense of place: the beginnings of ‘Scouse’
- 4 Frank Shaw and the founding of the ‘Scouse industry’
- 5 What is ‘Scouse’? Historical and theoretical issues
- 6 Liverpools: places, histories, differences
- Appendix. Stories of words: naming the place, naming the people
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Liverpool people can be recognised as soon as they open their mouth. Why Liverpool should be ashamed of this or touchy about it I cannot imagine. The intonation is the label of a citizenship which has no reason to hang its head. They should let London have its joke. All capital cities (not hearing themselves speak) think that provincial talk is funny. Marseille sends Paris into stitches, but a fat lot Marseille cares. (H.R. Shaw, ‘Liverpool Accent’, 1950)
The previous chapter attempted to challenge and revise the standard history of language in Liverpool by arguing that a distinctive form of language must have appeared in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and thus that the claim that the inhabitants of Liverpool used the same speech form as their Lancastrian neighbours as late as the 1830s is false. Notwithstanding this important revision, however, it is clear that the language of Liverpool must have been affected by the patterns of immigration to Liverpool (predominantly Irish but including other significant elements) in the mid to late nineteenth century. Evidence of the form itself is scant, though there are possible glimpses in literary accounts (always remembering, as noted earlier, the problems with textual material). Her Benny (1879), for example, the one book with which all Liverpool children used to be familiar, provides representations of the speech of Liverpool street kids that seem to confirm that there was indeed a distinct form in that environment at least.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- ScouseA Social and Cultural History, pp. 39 - 62Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012