Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- 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
4 - Frank Shaw and the founding of the ‘Scouse industry’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- 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
It seems fairly certain that Liverpoolese is of comparatively recent origin. (Richard Whittington-Egan, ‘Is Liverpool Dialect Dying Out?’, 1955)
The previous chapter illustrated the local interest in language in Liverpool in the early to mid twentieth century together with a number of the problems associated with its categorization. The account also presented evidence from the early 1950s onwards of an emerging link between a representation of the language of the city and the ‘Scouser’ (a cultural category that had existed for a considerable period but that was not in common use at the time). The connection was exemplified in Liverpool, the book marking Liverpool's 750th anniversary, which was written by the city's official historian (and librarian) George Chandler. Noting the importance of popular culture as a medium in which representations of the language and inhabitants of Liverpool were propagated, Chandler commented that ‘the speaker of the Liverpool dialect is through Music Hall fame widely known as a scouser’ (Chandler 1957: 423). And yet, as demonstrated earlier, one of the most striking things about the use of the term ‘Scouse’ to refer to the language of Liverpool is how recently it was coined. According to the lexicographical record at least, ‘Scouse’ in the sense of ‘the dialect of English spoken in Liverpool’, is a coinage of the 1960s. In fact, as the analysis in the last chapter began to show, ‘Scouse’ as a term used to denote the language of Liverpool started to appear in the 1950s in the correspondence, articles and features that focused on language in local newspapers and journals. But given that this was the case, how did a term that was apparently invented only in the 1950s become so lodged in popular cultural imagination as to be almost metonymic in relation to the city and its inhabitants? In other words, what were the means by which Liverpool and its people became so firmly associated with Scouse?
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- ScouseA Social and Cultural History, pp. 63 - 86Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2012