Scouse - History

History

Originally a small fishing village, Liverpool developed as a port, trading particularly with Ireland, and after the 1700s as an international trading and industrial centre. It became a melting pot of several languages and dialects, but primarily Lancastrian Irish, Welsh, English, Dutch, Scandinavian, German, Scots along with many others. The scouse people are renowned for their fast and quite often hard to understand talking but this way of communication has its economical values. During the late 19th century Bootle became the new and modern ground for British export and import and as the docking technology evolved so did the communication of the dockers; without modern health and safety rules and radio communication the busiest workers in britain developed their own rythemtic and flowing version of the English language. Northern scousers tend to talk quicker than those of the south of the city. As a result the Liverpool accent often has more in common with accents from other and global British Empire port cities such as Glasgow and Dublin than it does with neighbouring towns within Lancashire and Cheshire.

The influence of these different speech patterns became apparent in Liverpool and coastal Wirral, distinguishing the accent of its people from those of the surrounding Lancashire and Cheshire areas. It is only recently that Scouse has been treated as a cohesive accent/dialect; for many years, Liverpool was simply seen as a melting pot of different accents without one of its own. For example, the early dialect researcher A. J. Ellis said that Liverpool and Birkenhead had "no dialect proper".