‘The most deeply known human community is language itself’, Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, 1973: 245.

‘The city spoke in tongues and when it didn't speak it shouted’, Linda Grant, Still Here, 2002: 1.

Introduction

In August 1950, a Liverpool schoolteacher, John Farrell, published two long feature articles in the Liverpool Daily Post: ‘About that Liverpool accent (or dialect)’ and ‘This half-secret tongue of Liverpool’ (Farrell 1950a; 1950b). There had been interest in the language of Liverpool before that date, as evinced by a number of letters and brief articles in the local newspapers in the 1930s and 40s. But Farrell's essays are landmarks that signal the first attempt to address the distinctive nature of Liverpool speech (his first essay begins with a complaint about the tendency of ‘B.B.C. producers and others to represent the local speech-form as “Lancashire”’ Farrell 1950a: 4). Farrell considered vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation in his relatively well-informed writing, and launched a staunch defence of Liverpool English. Noting that ‘there are lots of intelligent people who look on any speaker of dialect as ill-bred and uneducated’, Farrell's response was salutary: ‘they should have more sense’ (Farrell 1950a: 4).

Important as Farrell's work was in its own right, it is probably most significant in that it appeared to stimulate the interest of Frank Shaw, a Customs official on Liverpool docks, who called the first meeting of ‘The Liverpool Dialect Society’ in November 1950. The LDS flopped, but this didn't prevent Shaw from going on to become the founder of what he himself called ‘the Scouse industry’ (Shaw was the first person recorded as using the term ‘Scouse’ to refer to the language of Liverpool in ‘“Scouse Lingo” – How it all began’ Shaw 1950b: 4). Shaw, a Tralee-born Irishman who moved to Liverpool in his twenties, claimed that his interest in the local form of speech began when he was trying to write short stories using Liverpool characters and places: ‘I realised that there was so much to learn about Liverpool that I decided to compile a glossary’ (Shaw 1950a: 5).