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Scouse is the accent or dialect of English found in the northern English city of Liverpool and adjoining urban areas of Lancashire and the Wirral region of Cheshire. The Liverpool accent is highly distinctive, and wholly different from the accents used in neighbouring regions of Lancashire and Cheshire.
The word Scouse was originally a variation of lobscouse (probably from the north German sailor's dish Labscaus), the name of a traditional dish of mutton stew mixed with hardtack eaten by sailors.
Lancashire has one of the most diverse selections of spoken accents of any English county or region. This is thought to be due to the large amount of immigration into the Liverpool area from Ireland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Scotland, other parts of northern England, and the Caribbean in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The influence of these speech patterns was strong in Liverpool, distinguishing the accent of its people from those of surrounding Lancashire and Cheshire.
The characteristic features of the accent of the region include:
- A fast, highly inflected manner of speech, with a range of rising and falling tones not typical of most of northern England.
- The final letters of many words are often lost in a glottal stop: i.e. 'get' becomes 'gerr.'
- The tongue tends to be swallowed, cutting off nasal passages and making it sound as if the speaker has a cold.
Irish influences include the pronunciation of the letter 'h' as 'haitch' and the plural of 'you' as 'yous'. The pronunciation of 'th' as 'd', and the 'ere' sound in 'there' as 'urr', are encountered in Northern Ireland. The dropping of the 'g' sound at the end of 'ing', hence 'doing' becomes 'doin' is also commonplace in Dublin. There are also idioms shared with Hiberno-English, such as "I know where you're at" (Standard English: "I know who you are").
Welsh influences include the distinctive rolling 'ck' sound, pronounced as in the Scots 'loch'. The letter 'r' is rolled, similar to Scots.
Expressions include 'la', as an abbreviation of lad, used to mean mate or pal, e.g. "Yer arright den, la'?" ("You all right then, lad?"). This should not be confused with 'lah', an expression used in Singapore and Malaysian English, which has a different meaning. The interjection 'eh!' is equivalent to 'hey!' or 'oi!' in other parts of the UK.
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