Although instantly recognisable today, the Liverpudlian accent and identity pose considerable problems of historical reconstruction. Liverpool's apartness has not always taken a ‘scouse’ inflexion. With characteristic Merseypride, George Chandler's Liverpool, the official celebration of the 750th anniversary of the charter, eschewed any suggestion of provincialism in speech or character:

In seeking the origins of ‘scouse’ – not just a pattern of speech but a micro-culture in historical formation – my essay has an important historio-graphical purpose. It seeks to expose some limitations of the fashionable ‘linguistic turn’ in historical studies and to raise questions about Liverpool's proverbial exceptionalism, its incompatibility with the narrative frameworks of modern British history. As a social historian, my purpose is not to engage with the complexities of semiotics and linguistic theory, but to explore the ambivalence and tension between cultural representation and socio-economic materialism. I intend simply to offer some historical commentary on linguistic studies of Liverpool vernacular speech, the unmistakable accent upon which the various cultural representations of the ‘scouser’ have been constructed.

The study of ‘scouse’ stands outside the linguistic turn in historical studies. While now exalting its importance, historians still tend to view language in narrow and restricted manner. The ideas and idioms of public language – rhetoric, discourse and text – retain pre-eminence. Demotic or vernacular speech is seldom considered, even though it is speech patterns which tend to express and encode critical differences of power and status in modern Britain. Concentrated for the most part on public political language – on the means by which political formations deploy rhetoric, narrative and other discursive practices to construct identities and create constituencies of support – the linguistic turn has marked a backward step, re-affirming the traditional historical agenda. Analysis of the ‘representational’ is restricted to a narrow and often readily accessible range of public ‘texts’.