Figure 8.1 summarises awareness of the nurse-sqare merger in the three age groups under scrutiny in this study. As explained at the beginning of this chapter, the database for this bar plot is not restricted to the 20 interviews used for the quantitative analyses, but includes information extracted from all 38 interviews that have been conducted by the author. The height of the bars represent the percentages of subjects in the relevant age groups who showed some sort of conscious awareness of the nurse-sqare merger, i.e. they either gave an explicit explanation of the feature or they at least provided relevant examples. As is obvious from the left-most bar, only 10% of the speakers in the oldest group mentioned this feature, so we can say that the variable is virtually unknown in this age group. In the middle-aged group (bar in the middle), 38.46% mentioned the feature. While this means that people who are not consciously aware of this variable are still in the majority, awareness *has* increased considerably and the feature does seem to have acquired a certain degree of salience within this group. When we look at the youngest speakers, however, this trend has apparently not

### 8 Awareness, comments, evaluation

been maintained: the percentage of subjects who explicitly commented on the nurse-sqare merger has not increased further, but actually dropped again to 13.33%, a value which is comparable to that of the oldest Liverpudlians in the sample. With respect to this vowel, therefore, salience seems to have decreased in the 19–29 year olds, only a small minority knows that fronted nurse variants are a characteristic feature of Liverpool English.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Lenition of /k/**

As far as lenition is concerned, it is first of all interesting to note that none of the 4 old speakers in the primary sample of this study talk about this feature at all. The retired teacher quoted at the beginning of §8.2.3 *might* constitute an exception, but even if one is willing to accept her statement as referring to lenition, it would clearly relate to lenition of *alveolar* plosives, not *velar* ones, which are the focus of this research.

In the group of subjects aged between 30 and 55, however, we do find a number of quotes that directly and explicitly refer to the way Scousers realise the phoneme /k/. Just as with the nurse-sqare merger, some of these comments are comparatively vague and essentially just consist of an example word containing the relevant variable. A female working-class speaker in this sub-sample, for instance, explained that one could identify someone from Liverpool based on "how people say *chicken* and all that" (13FWC44). Other speakers explicitly generalise and talk about the variable instead of just single words ("we pronounce 'k's quite strongly at the end of words, (…) or within words" – 33FMC38), although these more general descriptions are also often backed up with concrete examples ("people used to always ask me to say *chicken*" – 33FMC38). What is more, people often additionally single out the relevant variable ("it's like /x/" – 33FMC38) and describe the place of articulation, phonetically correctly, as "like, (quite) guttural, isn't it" (33FMC38 and 01MMC52).

If we focus on the youngest Liverpudlians that have been interviewed, explicit comments on lenition of /k/ actually abound – each of the 8 subjects in this age group that were included in the quantitative analysis mentioned this variable. Again, there are some rather vague explanations, such as one 19-year-old middleclass male referring to lenition of velar plosives as Liverpudlians "put[ting] an emphasis on 'k's'" (31MMC19). Most other comments in this age group, however, are very much to the point. One speaker mentions the variable ("definitely the "k"), provides examples ("if I was to say (…) *cook* [kʊx], *back* [bax]"), contrasts the standard realisation with the Scouse one, and even talks about his difficulties in producing the former:

8.2 Features of Scouse

(9) It's really hard for me to say [tʊk] rather than [tʊx]. (02MWC20)

These speakers are also aware of the fact that the "/x/ at the back of your throat" is particularly frequent in "some of the strong accents" and "quite distinctive" as well (04MWC19). Another subject in this age group even declares lenition of velar plosives to be a shibboleth. When asked to name sounds that distinguish Liverpool English from other accents he says:

(10) Of course you can tell (…) if people have the /x/ sound (…) when they speak. So it's easy to tell who's a Scouser, and who's not a Scouser. (25MMC19)

Other Liverpudlians between the ages of 19 and 29 also count "the /x/ sound" among the "main, like, characteristics of the accent" (36FWC20). This does not necessarily mean that they like this feature, though. For example, a middle-class female who talks about the "throaty /x/" in words like *chicken* and *bucket* also explains that she finds this pronunciation "really annoying" (06FMC20).

It is not unlikely that younger Scousers are particularly aware of this variable because it is not just a shibboleth for Liverpudlians, but also for outsiders. Two speakers in the sample mention lenition of /k/ as a typical feature of Scouse and reveal that their judgement is not exclusively influenced by their own observations, but, at least in part, by external perceptions of Liverpool English as well.  The first one names "the /x/ sound" as a typical Scouse pronunciation variant and adds that this statement is "based on what [she's] been skitted on in the past" (36FWC20), so she is especially conscious of the feature because other people (who are, presumably, not from Liverpool) have used it to make fun of her. The second speaker also provides a personal mini-narrative when she recounts that "people say 'say chicken', 'cause we say [t͡ʃɪxən]", and that ever since she entered university she had frequently been asked "do you want some chicken?" by people who wanted to "imitate [her]" (37FWC20). It is well possible that many other Liverpudlians have made rather similar experiences when interacting with speakers from other areas. After all, lenition is not only classified as a highly characteristic feature of Scouse by linguists, but, impressionistically at least, it also seems to be omnipresent in all imitations of Scouse by stand-up comedians and the like.

If we again zoom out a bit further and take into account all 38 interviews, the picture sketched above solidifies. Just as for the nurse-sqare merger, Figure 8.2 shows the percentage of speakers in the relevant age group that explicitly mentioned lenition of /k/ as a typical feature of Scouse. As can be seen quite clearly, the rate is, at 20%, quite low in the oldest group of speakers, which is represen-

### 8 Awareness, comments, evaluation

Figure 8.2: Awareness of /k/ lenition by age

ted by the bar on the left of the graph. Only one in five speakers aged 56 and older commented on lenition. In the middle-aged group, this rate has risen quite considerably: almost three out of four subjects (69.23%) are now aware of lenited /k/ variants. When we finally get to the youngest speakers investigated in this study, the bar (on the right) in the plot actually reaches the 100% threshold, which means that *every single* participant under 30 explicitly mentioned lenition of velar plosives as a typical feature of Scouse and commented on it. Awareness of lenition thus increases in a near-linear fashion from the oldest to the youngest participants: it starts out as a feature which only a handful of Liverpudlians are aware of, gains dramatically in prominence in the middle group, and finally reaches a state of full conscious awareness in the youngest generation of speakers interviewed.

Having said all that, it should be noted that it is quite possible that Scousers are *generally* aware of the variable but not, for some reason, of its presence *in their own speech*. There is some anecdotal evidence in my data that supports this idea. One subject (female, working-class, 20 years old) explicitly said that she didn't like lenition and therefore didn't use it:

(11) I can't even do it because I've spent that long, trying to, like, train me mouth not to do it. (36FWC20)

However, she has a mean PDF of 81.87%. So in actual fact, she *can* do it quite well, and uses the fricative realisation almost categorically. Very similar things could probably be said about a number of other subjects who proclaimed not to have a

### 8.3 Evolution and evaluation of Scouse

strong Scouse accent or who said they did not like lenited /k/ variants, but who nevertheless quite frequently *use* these variants.

### **8.3 Evolution and evaluation of Scouse**

### **8.3.1 Old speakers**

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Increase of "slovenly Scouse"**

All four older subjects in the primary sample in one way or another express the idea that Scouse has "really changed in the younger generation" (28FMC59). Two of them make reference to the Beatles, whose "Liverpool accent" was allegedly "different (…) because (…) it's become very guttural now" (08MMC62). One might be tempted to interpret this statement as referring to increased usage of the "guttural" /k/ lenition (cf. §7.2.5), and this might very well be what the speaker is talking about. However, the same term is also used by a female subject of about the same age when she says that "it used to be (…) quite guttural, the way *we* spoke" (28FMC59, my emphasis). It follows that, for her, Scouse has thus become *less* "guttural". This could either mean she has not noticed that younger Liverpudlians use more lenition, or that she thinks of something completely different when she says "guttural". In any case, she seems to think that Liverpool English has become more distinct from the surrounding area in her life time, because she explains that in the accent she "grew up with in the sixties, that everybody recognised through the Beatles", one encountered "Lancashire expressions very often" (28FMC59). She believes "the older accent" can still be heard in "[her] generation and the older people", whereas her sons could "perfectly mimic young Scouse men talking now" which apparently sounds "just bizarre" and "strange" because the accent has "really, really changed" (28FMC59).

Another speaker has the impression that "the percentage of people that speak really slovenly Scouse has increased" (05MWC66). This change is, in his opinion, primarily driven by "the poorer people", but he also finds that "it's mostly young people that talk like that", presumably because "as they get older (…) [their accent] gets a bit rounded off (05MWC66). If we follow this line of argumentation, the increase of "slovenly Scouse" would only be temporary on the level of the individual and restricted to speakers of a certain age (the same at any point in time!) at the level of the speech community. In opposition to this, another speaker states that the present generation "has got it's own language" in much the same way as "[her] generation had a language that was different from our parents"', so she seems to find it quite natural that "each generation just create[s] their own lan-

### 8 Awareness, comments, evaluation

guage completely" (18FWC67) – without suggesting that this is something that people necessarily do away with later in their life.

While this is a rather liberal stance on language change, it does not completely keep her from seeing something special in the most recent changes that she does not seem to be too happy about. According to her, "there are youngsters that will (…) not say the words properly and they will put (…) the Scouse accent on" (18FWC67). While it is not quite clear what exactly she means by "not saying the words properly", it is probably uncontroversial to assume she is referring to non-standard pronunciation, coupled with the fact that this seems to happen in a non-natural, inauthentic way, as the second part of the quote suggests. This "putting it on" is something she observes in her own family ("grandson can do it very well"), and which, apparently, can start with children that are "only nine" (18FWC67). Not only does she believe that the variety that younger Liverpudlians use is "totally different from the language [she] had, and [her] daughter had", but she even maintains that her two grandsons differed in linguistic behaviour, despite the fact that "there's only two years between the two of them" (18FWC67). Both, however, seem to be using varieties of English that are considerably different from her own because she reports frequently having to ask both of them to repeat utterances she did not understand.

This subject and the other woman in the group of older speakers hint at a possible reason why the accents of young Liverpudlians seem particularly strong to this generation. When (presumably) talking about the nurse-sqare merger (cf. §8.2.3) she does not only mention that younger Scousers "keep their teeth together" but she also adds that speakers of her generation "weren't allowed to do that" and that they "got told off" if they spoke with a markedly non-standard accent (18FWC67). The newly-retired teacher gives a slightly more detailed account and explains that her accent is now "modified (…), probably 'cause we had elocution at school" (28FMC59). Further research would be required to analyse if this is an experience that is rather particular to this individual speaker because she was "educated by nuns" and later became a teacher, or whether a sizeable proportion of Liverpudlians in this generation "learned to speak a more received pronunciation" (28FMC59) during their time at school.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> From "amiable" to "grating"**

When it comes to the evaluation of this change, the older speakers in my sample are relatively unanimous. The male working-class subject links stronger accents up not just with youth, but also with social deprivation when he says that "it's not all young people that talk like that", but especially "the poorer [ones]" among

them; a fact which he does not "decry[]" but which he attributes to the influence of their peers (05MWC66). He adds that he knows he himself speaks with a Scouse accent, but – crucially – "people can understand [him]" (05MWC66). The value judgement is not explicit here, but nevertheless not too difficult to unearth: he does not object to Scouse accents in general, as long as they do not hinder communication. A mild accent that expresses where one is from is fine, a strong one which makes it difficult (for outsiders) to understand the speaker, is not. His middle-class counterpart essentially voices the same belief, but does so in a more direct way. In his opinion, the accent has "got a lot coarser" and "harder (…) amongst younger people" (08MMC62). His choice of vocabulary already clearly suggests that he considers this to be "not so good", but his main criticism is that the supposed coarseness can "make [younger Scousers] unintelligible, (…) and they don't have to be" (08MMC62). It does not take too much interpretation to arrive at the conclusion that he probably also thinks they *should* not be.

Unintelligibility is, however, not the only potential problem that this age group sees in pronounced Liverpool accents. The working-class male explains that, for him, strong Scouse accents are "normal" because he has grown up in the city, but he also finds it understandable that "the way some [Scousers] (…) talk (…) can be intimidating" to *outsiders* (05MWC66). According to him, the "very, very few" Liverpudlians who use these strong accents do not "do good for us" (05MWC66), i.e. they have a detrimental influence on the national image of Liverpool because, with their strong and "intimidating" accents, they give an impression of the city which people from outside find rather unpleasant. This speaker is not exclusively worried about external perceptions, though, but also states that he himself is not a fan of "slovenly Scouse" – as he calls it –, when he reflects about people's motivation for using these varieties:

(12) I don't think they've consciously gone out to say "we'll speak this way so to get on everybody's nerves". The fact that it does is a bonus. (05MWC66)

So, while he does not assume that young Scousers *primarily* employ strong accents to annoy other people, he does believe that they like the idea ("a bonus") and he also acknowledges that they have this effect on him personally ("the fact that it does").

The two women in this age group seem to largely agree with this evaluation. One of them states that "the ordinary Scouse is quite amiable", but "the really (…) guttural one that they used in *Bread* (…) grates on your nerves" (18FWC67). Strong accents, such as the one that is heard in the BBC sitcom from the 80s, "grate", in her opinion, "because there's only a certain community that talks like that" (18FWC67) – presumably very deprived and poor people like the fictitious

### 8 Awareness, comments, evaluation

lower working-class family which *Bread* revolves around. While she does not claim that these kinds of accents are *exclusively* found among younger Liverpudlians, she does stress that particularly "some youngsters" use a kind of "plucking chicken language" (18FWC67), an attribute which can hardly be considered positive. The other older female speaker gives a very similar verdict when she says that, to her, modern Scouse accents seem "more staccato" than they used to be (28FMC59). She is not really happy about this and finds the resulting sound "not gentle" and "much more aggressive" (28FMC59) than the one she considers typical of her own youth.

### **8.3.2 Middle-aged speakers**

### **<IP_ADDRESS> Kids so Scouse it's unbelievable**

In the middle-aged group, fewer subjects explicitly talk about change in Liverpool English, but when they do their gist is similar to that of the oldest speakers in the sample. A male, middle-class speaker, for instance, argues there is "no doubt about it" that Scouse "definitely has changed" and he even provides a quite precise estimate that this is something that has happened in the "last sort of 10 years" (01MMC52). He also says that "when [he] was young" the accent was allegedly more "lyrical" and "singy songy", something which, he explains, can also still be heard in the speech of "some of the older people", so this is further evidence for the fact that he believes change in Scouse to be a rather new development, "something that's recently cracked in" (01MMC52). The same speaker also brings up the issue of unintelligibility, although he does not directly link it to younger Liverpudlians. He refers to an acquaintance who has "a really thick accent" and who, on a particular occasion, spoke in a way which made it impossible for a friend from Staffordshire to "understand him at all" (01MMC52). He goes on to explain that this was, in his opinion, mostly due to lenition of velar plosives ("he does /x/") and that he also believes that "he embellishes [his accent]" and "lay[s] it on a lot" (01MMC52), so a very strong accent that is unintelligible (to outsiders) is once more associated with inauthenticity.

Other speakers in this age group connect these kinds of accents more directly and explicitly with young Scousers. A 49-year-old working-class male,1 for instance, claimed that the accent was getting stronger and "rougher" with younger speakers, while not bringing up the subject of unintelligibility. One of his female counterparts, however, does just that in the following statement:

1During the interview of this subject the recording equipment failed. As a result, the last 2 minutes or so of his interview were not recorded. The above reproduction of his relevant statements is based on notes taken directly after the interview.

8.3 Evolution and evaluation of Scouse

(13) The kids, you know, they're so Scouse it's unbelievable. (…) I have difficulty understanding some of them. (13FWC44)

Here, the matter of change and unintelligibility is taken one step further. For this particular speaker, it is no longer just an issue of young Scousers being unintelligible to people who are not familiar with Liverpool accents. When she says that she herself sometimes has to "ask [her nieces and nephews] twice what they're saying" (13FWC44) she acknowledges that even middle-aged insiders occasionally run into difficulties when talking to young Liverpudlians with pronounced local accents. Interestingly, she also hypothesises about whether this might be a temporary issue, i.e. whether younger speakers might change their pronunciation to a more standard-like (or at least less local) accent later in their life (cf. §8.3.1). Her argument for this idea is based on pragmatic and presumably also economic and social reasons, because she explains that "as you get older and you're getting to work (…), you have to tone [the accent] down", and adds that this is particularly true "when you're dealing with the public" (13FWC44) – in cases where the speaker is in an exposed position where both intelligibility and social appropriateness are an issue.

### **<IP_ADDRESS> From "down-to earth" to "thick"**

Middle-aged speakers evaluate Scouse and the perceived change in the accent in a very similar way as the oldest subjects do (cf. §<IP_ADDRESS>). There is only one speaker in this age group who has exclusively positive things to say about Scouse. This woman explains that "[she] quite like[s] the accent", because for her "it sounds friendly" and "down to earth" (33FMC38). She also says that it does not sound "stuck up" (33FMC38), thereby implying that other varieties do, but without specifying which ones precisely she is comparing Scouse to. Other speakers focus more on negative aspects: the working-class male who classified the accents of younger Scousers as being "rougher", for instance, also explained that he found these accents "unpleasant" (17MWC49), a judgement which is already implicit in a term like "rough".

This speaker, and some others likewise, only explicitly talk about aspects of Scouse that they find disagreeable, but by expressly limiting their statements to particular sub-variants of Scouse (i.e. "strong" ones) they also imply that they evaluate other ("lighter") accents differently. For instance, the 52-year-old male in the sample is only talking about particularly strong Scouse accents as they are, in his opinion often found in younger speakers when he says: "I don't like it, no. I just kind of think it's a bit put on" (01MMC52). It should be noted that the

### 8 Awareness, comments, evaluation

dislike is, once more, connected with the fact that these accents are perceived as inauthentic and "false" (01MMC52).

Some subjects in this age group do, however, explicitly contrast different varieties of Scouse and make clear that they also judge them differently. One workingclass woman, for example, says that she "[doesn't] like the *broad* Scouse" because "it can sound thick, like somebody's not all together there", whereas speaking "with a little twang is alright" (13FWC44, my emphasis). In this particular case, "sounding thick" seems to be somewhat intermingled with communicative problems, because the subject immediately follows up the above statement with (another) short narrative of her nephew who apparently often talks in a way that "you just can't understand a word he's saying", so "he certainly couldn't communicate with an adult" but only "with his mates" and should therefore "tone it down a bit" (13FWC44). It is possible that this line of thought is limited to this one individual, but it would not be surprising if "being unintelligible" and "sounding unintelligent" turned out to be related concepts for many other speakers as well.

The following quote from a 33-year-old middle-class male probably quite nicely sums up attitudes towards Scouse in this age group:

(14) I think a natural sounding Liverpool accent that's not affected in any way sounds very nice, you know. I think, unfortunately, these days, there is an element of affectation. I think, again, probably that's just young people generally, you know. (…) I like the lilt, too [of the unaffected accent]. I like the (…) character that it brings. I don't like the over-emphasis of certain traits within the accent. (03MMC33)

Softer accents bring character and are perceived as nice, pleasant, and agreeable. Very pronounced accents, however, are not. The distinction into stronger and lighter accents is not expressly made in this quote, but it is paraphrased as "over-emphasis", on the one hand, and "unaffected" and "natural", on the other. It seems to me that this is a mental connection which is real for most speakers in this age group, and the old subjects as well. Strong Scouse accents are not only less acceptable because they can make a speaker unintelligible (although this does seem to be an important aspect), but also (and maybe even primarily) because middle-aged speakers perceive them as artificial, "affected", and "false". From the point of view of my subjects, these accents do make use of features that are recognised as being "to an extent a part of the accent" but, crucially, they are "overplayed" (03MMC33), which results in something that is perceived as a stereotypical accent performance and therefore rejected. While not limited to young Liverpudlians, this group of speakers seems to be the one that my middle-aged subjects primarily associate these "false" accents with.

### **8.3.3 Young speakers**

### **<IP_ADDRESS> A matter of personal experience**

The speakers aged between 19 and 29 are considerably less homogeneous as a group when it comes to the question of whether Scouse has changed or is currently changing. Some of them, like a 19-year-old working-class male, claim that they have "not noticed any change" and/or have "never heard anyone comment the fact the accent's changing at all", but acknowledge that this might simply be due to their young age and that, for instance, their parents "might notice differences" that they themselves do not (04MWC19). Interestingly however, this speaker then goes on to explain that he would be reluctant to say his own parents "speak with a Liverpool accent in actual fact", and that his mother in particular uses "a softer (…) [and] slightly more refined" accent (04MWC19). His personal experience would thus seem to contradict his statement that he has not noticed any change in the accent, but apparently he is unwilling to extrapolate the differences within his family to a larger part of the population, for some reason.

The two young middle-class women in the primary sample are very similar in this respect. When directly asked whether she believes Scouse is changing the first one flatly rejects this idea with the words: "no, it's about the same" (06FMC20). Earlier in her interview, however, when the subject of (local) identity was discussed, she explained that she would not use the label "Scouser" for herself, but that she would "call [her] mum and dad Scousers, 'cause their accent is significantly stronger than what [hers] is" (06FMC20). We have thus, again, a young speaker who has personal experience of apparent time change (though in the opposite direction of what most older subjects report), but does not seem to consider it representative of the more general situation in Liverpool.

The other female middle-class speaker likewise says that she has not "noticed [Scouse] changing", but then immediately goes on to talk about her parents, who "don't really have a strong Liverpool accent *anymore*" (my emphasis), despite the fact that they have grown up in the Dingle and Toxteth, respectively, which are both traditional working-class districts that the subject herself describes as "quite rough areas of Liverpool", at least when her parents were young (07FMC23). Her explanation for the "softer" accents of her parents is that they later moved "out of the centre" to a northern suburb and "lost their accent, if they had one" (07FMC23). To be fair, the second part of this statement ("if they had one") indicates that she is aware of the fact that her parents might never have had such a strong accent as is nowadays typical for speakers from these districts (which would be evidence for accent change), but she does not know and apparently

prefers the hypothesis that her parents changed, instead of the accent itself. It is possible that this focus on the individual is due to the fact that she has observed changes in her own use of language in her recent past. She speculates that she might have had "a stronger accent" before she went to university where she "lived with quite a lot of people from down south (…) and [her] accent just became really weird", whereas now that she has been living and working in Liverpool again for a number of years, friends and acquaintances from outside the city tell her that she has "got more Scouse" again, though she herself "can't tell" (07FMC23).

Most of the subjects that do believe Scouse is changing or has changed also base their opinion on evidence collected in their family context. There is one male middle-class speaker in my sample who believes, and explicitly verbalises, that Liverpool English is "getting less distinguished", based on the evidence that in the generation of his grand parents "they've got really strong accents" (25MMC19), although it is unclear whether he is primarily referring to his own grand parents or to this age group more generally. The remainder of the young Scousers, however, agree with the majority of the old and middle-aged speakers in saying that (a) "the accent itself has changed, definitely" (02MWC20), and that (b) the "Scouse accent's become stronger" (31MMC19). Younger speakers apparently often realise this first when they compare their own speech with that of other family members, like the middle-class male just quoted, who explains:

(15) I talk a bit different to me mum or the rest of me family, but me and me brother talk the same, like, as each other or me mates. (31MMC19)

Some speakers are also conscious of the fact that there is probably an interaction of age and other social factors like the socioeconomic background of speakers in certain areas of the city. One interviewee, for instance, says that, in general, Scouse has "become thicker in a lot of terms" and adds that this is particularly true in "deprived areas" of Liverpool, "to the point where people (…) have actually asked (…): 'Are you from Liverpool?'", despite the fact that he himself has "a much more heavier accent" than both his parents (02MWC20). Another participant provides examples for this claim when she says that "if you grew up in Anfield or Kensington [inner city working-class districts], you're gonna sound Scouser than someone who grew up in Childwall [a more affluent suburb]" (36FWC20). She does, however, also believe that Liverpool English, as a whole, is different today than it was "a few decades ago" when it was presumably "closer to the Manchester accent" (36FWC20). Her point of reference seems to be the 60s because she mentions that in "clips of the Beatles, if you listen to John Lennon speak, he doesn't sound Scouse" although he was, which is evid-

### 8.3 Evolution and evaluation of Scouse

ence for her that the accent has "definitely changed since then, it's obviously evolved" (36FWC20).

### **<IP_ADDRESS> "Unpleasant but friendly"**

With respect to evaluating the perceived change of Scouse and its current form, there is again a wide range of different comments and attitudes among the youngest speakers in my sample. Few people directly comment the change itself, and when they do they do not express very strong opinions about it. A male workingclass speaker, for instance, says that he "wouldn't really have a bad or positive comment on the change, to be honest" because for him it is just something that "happens" (02MWC20). A female of the same age explains that she is not sure "if [she] prefer[s], like, John Lennon's accent to [the modern one]" or the other way round (36FWC20). In general, subjects are much more willing to provide evaluations of (varieties of) modern Scouse, rather than on the process of accent change. Often, these judgements are similarly ambiguous as the ones expressed by the old and the middle-aged speakers. For instance, Scouse can be described as "unpleasant but (…) friendly at the same time" because Scousers are both "so loud and confident" (31MMC19). Another speaker explains that, to him as an insider, "it sounds friendly, but [he doesn't] know what it sounds, like, from outside looking in" and he can well imagine that, in the latter case, "it could be a bit intimidating sometimes" (25MMC19) – which is particularly interesting because it is an almost word-by-word repetition of something another Liverpudlians said who is more than 45 years older and from a different social class (cf. §<IP_ADDRESS>).

Just like speakers of their parents' and grand parents' generation, the youngest subjects in my sample also often evaluate Scouse differently depending on whether it is considered to be a stronger or a lighter variant. This is exemplified by statements such as "if it's a soft Scouse accent (…) I haven't got a problem with it", provided people "speak correctly" and "as long as I can understand them" (06FMC20), which is evidence for the fact that (un)intelligibility is as much of an issue and a relevant factor for evaluation among the youngest Scousers as it is in the middle-aged and the old group. Not every kind of Scouse accent is seen as somewhat problematic, but "the really, really thick accent where you can't understand what they're saying" is very frequently, albeit not always, considered as "very annoying" (04MWC19). The same holds true for the whole matter of authenticity. Consider the following quote:

(16) [Scouse] does sound quite friendly and I quite like it, unless it's incredibly thick. I mean, I like the light accent, and my accent, most Liverpudlian

### 8 Awareness, comments, evaluation

accent[s]. But when you get over the top with it then it's just plain ridiculous. I mean, there's no reason to go /x/ all the time. (04MWC19)

'Thick" accents are judged just as negatively as inauthentic ones where people "go over the top with it".The "plain ridiculous" accent of this kind is interpreted as the result of a (perhaps semi-)conscious process, not as something that is just naturally there from the start: The speaker believes there is no compelling "reason" to use the stigmatised fricative realisation of the velar plosive "all the time"; it is a decision people make instead of something they cannot help.

A different male working-class speaker talks about the same issue – "plastic" Scouse accents – in the context of the media (where conscious accent performances are much more likely to occur than in "real life"). He mentions that he "cannot stand [Scouse]" on television because it "sounds either really harsh or really blunt", and that "there's nothing worse than a person who has a really weird thick Scouse accent" (02MWC20). Why those accents are not just "thick", but also "weird" is also explained by this interviewee: "You know, like, most of us don't speak like what you actually see on the TV" (02MWC20). He feels he can tell "if someone's really putting it on", i.e. if they are a plastic Scouser, and finds this kind of thing "very annoying" (02MWC20). This speaker is also rather explicit on the fact that a "thick" accent is not *necessarily* also a "plastic" one, so the two concepts have to be kept separate. He stresses that there are "Scousers that (…) have a perfectly reasonable (…) tinge and (…) perfectly fine TV accent"; one of his examples is the comedian John Bishop who, as the participant notes himself "has quite a strong Liverpudlian accent", but nevertheless one that appears to be acceptable because it is not perceived as inauthentic (02MWC20). Interestingly (but probably not too surprisingly), a speaker from the middle-aged group used John Bishop as a prime example of a plastic Scouser, so it is presumably controversial among Liverpudlians where exactly the "plastic" line is to be drawn.

Negative comments and evaluations are, however, not exclusively limited to "plastic" accents, as has been shown above. In particular, three female subjects in my sample can be said to be primarily critical of Scouse, as is obvious from the fact that they almost exclusively express negative feelings towards their accent. For example, they describe the perceived change in the accent as Scouse having "gone more common" (36FWC20) or "harsher" (37FWC20), although it has to be said that this does not keep Liverpool English from also carrying connotations of home and familiarity for these speakers (e.g. when hearing Scouse accents on holiday – 37FWC20). Nevertheless, they remark that Scouse is "not [their] favourite accent", an attitude which is likely to be influenced by the awareness that, from an external point of view, the Liverpool accent is among "the most hated

### 8.3 Evolution and evaluation of Scouse

in England" (07FMC23). In a very similar vein, a different speaker mentions that she sometimes asks her brother to "speak properly" because his natural accent is "stronger than ours" and "sounds scallyish" (36FWC20) – *scally* being a term commonly used to refer to the stereotype of the self-assured, boisterous, and criminal (male) working-class Scouser.

The subject acknowledges that many speakers are not able to consciously control their pronunciation very well when she says that "most of the time people can't help the way they speak". All the same she insists that "just because you're from Liverpool, you don't need to speak like you were drugged", which is a rather harsh judgement, especially when considered against the backdrop that this is apparently also "how [her own] voice sounds when [she's] not thinking about the way words come out" (36FWC20). As has been reported earlier this speaker has apparently indeed tried hard to eliminate stereotyped features like lenition from her speech, but while she believes to have succeeded, the data collected for this study tell a different story (cf. §8.2.3). The fact alone that she tries, however, says a lot about her attitudes towards Scouse. Her motivation lies in the fact that she has internalised some of the negative stereotypes about Scouse, although this causes her some distress because it is her "home" accent, after all. She seems to be rather aware of this whole process and provides a comparatively detailed description:

(17) If I thought it was a beautiful sound, if I thought it was educated, and a proper way to speak – then (…) I wouldn't try and think about the way I'm saying things. (…) No, I do think it can sound uneducated and I wish it didn't, but…(36FWC20)

It should be noted, however, that these extreme attitudes (which border on dissociation) are clearly the exception – most younger subjects express much more moderate views, especially when they voice negative thoughts about Liverpool English.

## **9 Discussion (production)**

This chapter will provide a summary and interpretation of the (most important) results reported in Chapters 6, 7, and 8. In line with the primary interest of this study, the focus will be on what patterns of usage, distributions across social groups, and explicit comments and attitudes tell us about the status of the variables under scrutiny here: That is to say whether they can best be classified as indicators, markers, or stereotypes.

### **9.1 happy: Indicator (of northernness)**

### **9.1.1 Overall age differences**

F1-F2 plots of happy have shown that this vowel is not stable across the three generations of speakers investigated in this study, neither in terms of height nor with respect to frontness (though change in the latter is only significant in the raw data, but not once the random effects of individuals and carrier words have been eliminated by a mixed linear effects model). Rather, realisations of this vowel become simultaneously lower and more central from the old to the middle-aged, and from the middle-aged to the young speakers in my sample. Nevertheless, Pillai scores show that happy and fleece are completely merged for *all* speakers. Given that the vowels could only be compared in the two (formal) reading tasks this might be expected, because, in such contexts, happy is more likely to be tense due to phonetic factors such as duration. It turns out, however, that happy and fleece are actually moving together: *both* vowels are more central in the middle and the young group. At the same time, though, the distance between mean realisations of fleece and happy is increasing in the younger participants, which means that the two vowels are actually becoming more distinct due to happy being more strongly centralised than fleece – thus, while both vowels are moving, it does appear to be primarily happy that is changing. A general caveat is still in order, because all the differences between age groups are in fact very subtle. Impressionistically at least, almost all happy realisations are still acoustically tense, even in the youngest speakers.

### 9 Discussion (production)

Nonetheless, there is a measurable and statistically robust trend for younger speakers to have laxer and therefore less Scouse realisations of happy. Since these speakers were actually expected to have more *local* pronunciation, an explanation is warranted. Flynn (2010) found young speakers from Nottingham to employ ultra-lax variants of happy in an attempt to further distance themselves from the south of England and to emphasise their identities as (working-class) northerners. I suspect that young Scousers use laxer happy variants for the same reason. Qualitative analysis of comments about identity (cf. §8.1.3) revealed that older subjects often consider Liverpool to be "unique" or 'distinct' from the rest of England, both north and south. In the middle and particularly the young group, however, having a secondary identity as a northerner seems perfectly acceptable and even normal to the majority of subjects. Younger Scousers often readily embrace a northern identity as a means of setting themselves apart from the south and, at the same time, associating with other northern cities that they perceive as (more) similar to Liverpool.

As mentioned above, change in happy is subtle, but it *is* a movement *away* from both the traditional local norm and the modern standard pronunciation (both of which are tense), and *towards* the variant that is typical for the majority of speakers in the linguistic north of England (the only exceptions being Liverpool and Newcastle). Centralising happy can be seen as a way of linguistically expressing solidarity with other northern cities and keeping one's distance from 'the south', a region that many Liverpudlians consider to be both geographically and culturally distant.

### **9.1.2 Gender and class**

The more detailed analysis of happy in §6.1.1 and §6.1.2 showed that both gender and social class also play a role in how this vowel is realised. For instance, it turns out that the age difference discussed above is exclusively driven by female speakers. The men in my sample actually all have comparatively low happy variants, regardless of their age. Women seem to have been adapting to the men in this respect for quite a while and have now done so to the point that there is no significant gender difference in the youngest generation of speakers any more, which could actually indicate that this variable is slightly more salient in the older two generations.

With respect to the front-back dimension women only have happy variants that are statistically different from those of men when they speak freely and when they imitate a particularly strong Scouse accent. In the former case, women's realisations are fronter, in the latter they are more retracted. It is not

### 9.1 happy: Indicator (of northernness)

really surprising for women to have fronter happy variants than men in spontaneous speech, because these fronter realisations are actually closer to the (modern) standard, and numerous sociolinguistic studies have shown that women generally tend to use more standard variants than men. It does seem strange, however, that they would use more retracted vowels than male speakers when performing Liverpool English, given that stereotypical Scouse should have *tense* happy. This could be a hint that women are at least sub-consciously aware of the fact that men actually have more central variants than they themselves in spontaneous speech. If we assume that the typical Scouser people think of when they are asked to perform the accent is male (which does not seem too far-fetched, given the negative stereotypes associated with Liverpool), then one can interpret women's happy realisation during accent imitation as more "realistic" than "stereotypical". This argument is rather speculative, but it is striking that women's mean and median F2 during accent performance are virtually identical to the values that men have in spontaneous speech (cf. Figure 6.12 on page 100).

Providing a coherent and unifying interpretation of social class is even more difficult, because it interacts with gender when trying to predict F1, and age when the focus is on F2. Women actually use higher happy variants than men in both the working and the middle class, but in the former the difference is more pronounced than in the latter. In fact, it is mostly working-class women that stick out. Middle-class women, middle-class men, and working-class men all have comparatively similar mean F1 values, whereas happy realisations of working-class women are considerably higher and thus more Scouse (cf. Figure 6.4a on page 87). This result is diametrically opposed to Flynn's (2010) finding, because in his study (young) working-class women were the ones that drove the change towards ultra-lax happy variants, whereas in my data, these speakers seem to be the ones that have the most tense variants. The impact of social class on F2, as mentioned above, depends on the age of the participant: in the old and the middleaged group, working-class speakers have fronter vowels, but among the youngest speakers the effect is reversed and working-class Scousers actually have more central variants.

Women having more standard-like realisations is in line with what many sociolinguists have found in many different contexts, but it is unclear why workingclass women in particular would have more standard realisations than their middle-class counterparts – unless they were hypercorrecting, which is not particularly likely for a largely non-salient (see below) variable. What is more, being working-class favours tenser pronunciations with respect to F1 for all age groups, but as far as F2 is concerned, this is only true for old and middle-aged speakers.

### 9 Discussion (production)

For the youngest speakers, however, the effect is reversed, and working-class speakers now *dis*favour tense happy realisations. The evidence regarding gender and class thus presents itself as rather inconclusive and difficult to interpret.

### **9.1.3 Style shifting and awareness**

When it comes to style shifting the three generations of speakers do not show any significant differences: All speakers use higher and fronter variants of happy when they read out a word list and also when they perform a stereotypical Scouse accent (for F2 style differences are statistically less robust). This is not the pattern that is commonly associated with Labovian style shifting, but register does have an impact on how happy is realised, so an explanation is called for.

The lower F1 and higher F2 values in the word list readings could be explained phonetically (slower and clearer articulation, resulting in more peripheral vowels generally), but this is difficult for accent performance, where the same trend (of more peripheral realisations) was observed. People seem to believe, as explicit comments revealed, that speaking *fast* is a typical feature of Scouse, so provided they incorporate this aspect into their stereotype performance it would rather favour *laxer* realisations of happy instead of tenser ones. In fact, vowel durations were somewhat shorter during imitation only for the youngest speakers in the sample, the rest had happy pronunciations of similar length in text reading, spontaneous speech, and accent imitation (cf. Table 6.4). In none of the three age groups can vowel duration thus be part of the explanation why happy realisations are tenser during performance of a strong Scouse accent – for the youngest speakers durations would even pull in the opposite direction.

Another interpretation of the U-shaped line in the two relevant graphs is that two different and, in a way, conflicting, speech norms are at work here. When people read through the list, they converge towards the standard pronunciation, which is /i/, nowadays, whereas when they do the hyper-Scouse pronunciations, they tend to use more /i/-like vowels because that is what distinguishes Scouse from the directly surrounding accents. In the "reading" and "free" styles, articulation is a bit more relaxed (with respect to *both* norms) and happy tends to be lower, possibly simply for reasons of economy. The approach of two conflicting norms that pull in the same direction might seem slightly unsatisfying, but some sort of very vague sub-conscious awareness of happy as a feature of Liverpool English must be assumed if the increase in height and frontness in the imitation register is to be explained.

Interestingly, Newbrook (1999: 102) also found "anomalous stylistic patterning" in West Wirral and adds that (a) "there was a major issue in respect to

9.2 nurse: Marker to stereotype and back again

*norms*" (my emphasis), and that (b) "[t]his applie[d] in particular to happy" (Newbrook 1999: 102). Part of the problem is certainly that "the dialectological facts are complex and the interpretation of responses is often debatable", and also that many subjects seemed to be confused "as to what the RP form might actually be", which is his explanation for the fact that the majority of his participants endorsed [i] despite the fact that this was still a non-standard variant in 1980 when he collected his data (Newbrook 1999: 101). On the basis of my data at least, *conscious* awareness is out of the question: Not a single participant mentioned happy-tensing as a typical feature of Liverpool English, or otherwise commented on it.

### **9.1.4 Classification**

The analysis of happy realisations has unearthed a number of features which hint at a certain degree of salience: there is some very basic social stratification, and there is a certain impact of register. However, both are less robust for F2, the vowel dimension that usually does most of the sociolinguistic work (cf. Labov 2006: 502). Furthermore, social factors are clearly much less important as predictors of formant values (irrespective of whether we are talking about F1 or F2) than they are for nurse (cf. §9.2), which indicates lower relative salience and strongly suggests that the centralisation of happy is a change from below (cf. Labov 1994: 78). No prototypical style shifting is found for happy, but style differences are clearly not random either. Since the (somewhat confusing) impact of style is the same in all age groups and can be interpreted as showing at least the beginnings of some sort of awareness, it seems therefore justified to conclude that happy is somewhere in between an indicator and a marker for all speakers investigated – with the aside that it might actually be on its way to returning firmly to the status of an indicator with the youngest speakers, given that gender no longer plays a role.

### **9.2 nurse: Marker to stereotype and back again**

### **9.2.1 Overall age differences**

Traditional vowel plots of mean nurse and sqare realisations (pooled across different speaking styles) revealed that the former is (still) more central than the latter for all speakers investigated. Both vowels do however become higher and fronter from the youngest to the oldest subjects (which means that nurse, in particular, is becoming more Scouse, but only with respect to F2). At the same

### 9 Discussion (production)

time the distance between the means decreases, which means that for young Liverpudlians nurse and sqare are considerably less distinct than for middle-aged and old Scousers. Just as for happy and fleece, a caveat is in order here, because, once again, the differences between the two vowels are minute in absolute terms (especially as far as the F1 dimension is concerned), even for the oldest speakers where the distance is greatest. This idea is corroborated by Pillai scores that are universally near 0 and show nurse and sqare to be almost perfectly merged in any age group and for any style.

All the same, differences between the age groups could be found, even if they were rather subtle in nature. For one thing, realisations in the old group mostly vary with respect to F1, whereas middle-aged speakers show more variation in F2. This alone can already hint at a slight increase in salience from the old to the middle-aged speakers, because a wider range of F2 values (as the sociolinguistically more important dimension) suggests a potentially higher functional load when it comes to the social meaning of the variables. Generally speaking, there is less variation in the most formal and the most informal (stereotyped) styles, which shows that speakers seem to be more agreed on the target realisations of the two vowels in these registers. Crucially, the difference between the styles decreases across the generations, particularly from the middle-aged to the young generation. The youngest speakers in the sample not only show few differences in-between speaking styles, but they also exhibit a very small degree of variation across the board, even in spontaneous speech. Both points serve as evidence for the fact that the realisations of nurse and sqare seem to have largely stabilised in speakers aged between 19 and 29, which speaks for a decrease in salience, in particular from the middle to the young generation.

Plots of mean vowel realisations also revealed interesting differences between the age groups in how nurse and sqare change along the style continuum. Among the oldest speakers that were interviewed both vowels move to the front during accent performance, which is the expected behaviour, particularly for nurse. 1 In the remaining three styles, however, nurse is remarkably stable and it is mostly sqare that moves – crucially, this movement is*towards* nurse rather than away from it, which means that the two vowels are actually more instead of less merged the more formal the register. This is thus a mild case of hypercorrection, because by centralising sqare (which makes it *less* standard) instead of nurse (which would become *more* standard), people are actually moving the "wrong" vowel.

1This also indicates that even for these speakers the target for a Scouse nurse is a front vowel, not a central one as some people might suspect given the history of the merger in Liverpool; cf. §3.4.2.

Speakers of Scouse aged between 30 and 55 also behave as expected when they are asked to perform a stereotypical Scouse accent: both nurse and sqare are fronter than in spontaneous speech. For the reading passage, middle-aged Liverpudlians adjust the vowels in the same way as the old generation. nurse hardly moves at all, while sqare is centralised and thus approaches nurse. When these speakers read out a word list, finally, sqare is even further back, while nurse actually gets *fronted*. As a result, nurse ends up fronter than sqare in this particular speech style. We have thus a situation that is characterised not only by the fact that the two vowels are more instead of less merged in more formal contexts, but also by a reversal of their relative positioning to each other. Speakers of the middle generation can therefore be said to present a textbook case of hypercorrection, because their behaviour results in the opposite of what they are presumably trying to achieve: nurse and sqare pronunciations are even more non-standard in formal registers than they already are in spontaneous speech. This suggests both heightened awareness of the social meaning of this merger (hence the urge to modify usage according to communicative situation) and also a certain degree of linguistic insecurity with respect to this variable.

Among the youngest speakers style seems to be much less important. nurse and sqare are about equally stable across different registers. This is true both in terms of how big the realisational space is (i.e. the range of occurring variants) and where the centres of gravity of the vowel clouds are to be found. Variation between styles is negligible, the position of both vowels largely constant. Young speakers have completely merged distributions and almost identical mean realisations in all speech styles, which strongly suggests that salience of the nursesqare merger is very low at best in this group.

It was also shown that the (age) group Pillai scores hide a considerable degree of inter-speaker variation, at least as far as the old and the middle-aged participants are concerned. These two samples of speakers divide rather neatly into two separate sub-groups: (1) Completely merged speakers with Pillai scores near 0, and (2) speakers with comparatively high Pillai scores, who keep nurse and sqare distinct. The crucial finding here is that, for the oldest speakers, higher Pillai scores correlate with higher social status, because it is the middle-class speakers who maintain a distinction and the working-class participants who are (more) merged – just as one would expect in the early phases of the social life cycle of a linguistic variable. In the middle-aged group there are both middle *and* working-class speakers among the merged and the distinct subjects, which shows that awareness has spread to at least some working-class speakers (who then try to keep the two vowels more distinct) and also that, in the middle class,

speakers have started hypercorrecting, possibly because social awareness (and stigmatisation) of this variable has increased for them as well. When one looks at the young speakers class is no longer an issue at all, because everybody has merged distributions: this echoes the non-impact of style and provides further support to the idea that the merger has reached completion and simultaneously dropped completely below the radar again (at least in production).

### **9.2.2 Gender and social class**

Zooming in on nurse realisations in particular revealed that gender and social class interact with age of the participant (and with each other) in a number of ways. For instance, the mixed linear effects model showed that women had nurse vowels which were significantly higher and fronter than those of men. As far as F1 is concerned, however, this effect decreases from the old to the young speakers, and is no longer significant for the latter, which is additional evidence for the claim made above that the social salience of this variable is lower in the youngest speakers. Women use higher, i.e. more standard, realisations of nurse in all three age groups, which is what one would expect to find for a socially meaningful variable. Their values are rather stable across the generations as well, which means that the apparent time change in F1 is almost exclusively driven by men, who have raised their nurse to converge with the women in the young group of speakers.

When we look at the front-back dimension, there is no significant gender difference, neither in the oldest nor the youngest speakers. For the middle group, however, the difference between men and women is not only highly significant, but women actually have nurse realisations that are so much fronter (more Scouse) than those of men that the regression model still returns gender as a significant effect although it is only so in this one sub-group. It would appear strange that women should use more Scouse variants of a salient variable, but if we remember that it is precisely the middle age group that was found to hypercorrect, then this actually makes sense. If a group of speakers is aware of a non-standard feature and so eager to avoid it that they develop a tendency to modify it in the "wrong" direction then it should come as no surprise that that tendency is actually more pronounced for women, given that female speakers are generally held to be more sensitive to linguistic differences that carry social meaning.

Social class has an effect on F2 that is somewhat similar to the one that gender has on F1, albeit in a more moderate way. Middle-class speakers have more central (standard) nurse variants across all three generations, which is in line with

### 9.2 nurse: Marker to stereotype and back again

most previous research in sociolinguistics. However, this difference gets progressively smaller from the oldest to the youngest speakers, which can be seen as further evidence that nurse is decreasing in salience, although it has to be said that the class difference is still statistically significant even in the youngest group. Working-class speakers have thus always (within the time frame that is the focus of this study) had very front nurse variants, while middle-class speakers have been adapting to this model in the last 50 years or so.

Class and gender of participant interact for both F1 and F2 of nurse, but only in terms of degree, not direction, of effects. That is to say that, for F1 for instance, the gender effect is more pronounced in the middle class (which is to say the distance between the means is greater), but it is highly significant both among middle- *and* working-class subjects. Interestingly, middle-class speakers of both genders seem to have lower, more Scouse, vowels than working-class Liverpudlians. This is unexpected, but it is not the first time this issue has come up. After all, one might ask more generally why nurse is consistently shifted upwards throughout each generation (which makes it *less* Scouse) while simultaneously being fronted (which makes it *more* Scouse). What might be happening is that fronting of nurse is at least a semi-conscious process due to the social importance of the F2 dimension of English vowels, whereas the raising is a change from below that is completely subconscious. If raising of nurse was a change from below it would not be surprising, but actually *expected* to see (working-class) women in the vanguard (cf. Labov 2001: 292–293), as is the case in my sample, where nurse realisations become lower and thus more Scouse from workingclass women to working-class men, followed by middle-class women and finally middle-class men. For the front-back dimension of nurse the gender difference is actually somewhat clearer in the working class, but again it should be noted that men and women differ significantly in *both* classes. Women's higher F2 values have been linked to hypercorrection above, and it would not be surprising if this was primarily a feature of the (upper) working class, given that their realisations are, on average, fronter to start with, which could mean that working-class females feel a greater need to "correct" their pronunciation. As a general note of caution, however, I would like to repeat that the results summarised in this paragraph pertain to rather subtle differences of degree and should not be overinterpreted.

### **9.2.3 Style shifting and awareness**

When it comes to style shifting there are also some differences between F1 and F2. In the height dimension, there is little to no style shifting that reaches statistical

significance. If anything, it can be found for the oldest speakers in the sample, but the trend is in the unexpected direction: nurse becomes lower (more Scouse) instead of higher in the more formal styles. When style shifting is investigated for the two genders separately, it turns out that this unexpected trend is actually driven by women of *all* age groups, whereas men exhibit next to no register differences. A similarly clear distinction is found with social class: The downward trend towards less Scouse variants the more informal the communicative context is more pronounced for middle-class subjects, particularly for the middle age group. This is again in line with previous research: Female and middle-class speakers exhibiting more style shifting is just what is to be expected for a salient variable. It is true that the shift is in the unexpected direction but this issue has already been discussed above: If raising of nurse is a change from below it *should* actually manifest itself first (and in a more pronounced way) in more informal registers.

Age groups also differ with regard to the impact of style on frontness of nurse. The oldest speakers exhibit almost no style shifting, nurse realisations are only significantly fronter when people imitate a strong Scouse accent – in the other three styles pronunciations are identical from a statistical point of view. In principle, this holds for both social classes, the differences in style shifting (which is to say the changes between styles, not the absolute values!) are only marginal. Both points support, once more, the idea that salience of this feature is rather low for these speakers.

In the middle-aged group, nurse is significantly less front in free speech than in all the other three styles, which means that the vowel does not only become more Scouse during performance of a strong accent, but also when people read out a text or a word list. Again, working- and middle-class speakers behave in a rather similar fashion. If one only looked at this result in isolation it would be tempting to conclude that there is little style shifting and therefore hardly any awareness of the variable. However, we know from looking at nurse realisations in relation to sqare that the middle-age group is actually very prone to hypercorrection: they do manipulate *both* vowels in a consistent way, which is just not the expected one; nurse is progressively fronted the more formal the register. It is this process that is responsible for pronunciations that are comparable in the most formal and the most informal styles, not a lack of salience. The fact that both middle *and* working-class speakers hypercorrect underlines this by showing that awareness of, and linguistic insecurity relating to this merger seem to be universal in this age group.

The youngest speakers, finally, have steadily increasing (and significantly different) F2 values from reading out a text to free speech and accent imitation. The

### 9.2 nurse: Marker to stereotype and back again

only part of their graph which does not look like prototypical style shifting is that nurse is also significantly more front (and thus more Scouse) when these speakers read out a word list. It seems thus as if younger Scousers actually style-shift more consistently than older Liverpudlians, which would be in stark contrast with the evidence discussed in §9.2.1 and §9.2.2, where I argued that salience was *de*creasing for the youngest Scousers. The contradiction is only apparent, however. For one thing, the shifting pattern just described is not representative of all speakers in this age group. Middle- and working-class Scousers aged 29 and younger behave differently, and this difference is not just one of degree. Rather, working-class speakers contribute the (hypercorrect) fronting in the word list style, while the middle-class subjects are responsible for the steep rise of F2 during accent performance. The remaining three styles are not significantly different from each other in both social classes, so taken separately none of them are great style shifters. In fact, young middle-class Scousers have the flattest line in the sample, i.e. they have a smaller amount of style shifting than any other group (plus there is no significant drop of F2 in free speech due to hypercorrection in "reading" and "list").

The other aspect worth considering is that it was shown in §6.2.3 (and discussed in §9.2.1) that young Scousers have the most merged distributions and show the fewest style differences when nurse and sqare are analysed *together*. It is true that nurse is somewhat more centralised when these speakers read out a text, but so is sqare, which means that vowel distributions are just as merged (and therefore non-standard) as in the other registers. We can therefore say that the salience of this variable is not gone completely: Young middle-class Liverpudlians still have at least some sub-conscious awareness of fronter nurse variants as a typical feature of Scouse (which explains the fronting during performance), while young working-class speakers still hypercorrect a bit in the most formal styles (which accounts for the fronting in the word list). All in all, however, style shifting (and therefore salience) is a lot less pronounced in this age group than the relevant line plots suggest, and the impact of style is certainly less than in the middle-aged group.

Explicit comments made by my subjects fit in rather well with people's linguistic behaviour as it has been described and interpreted in this section so far. Generally speaking, the nurse-sqare merger is not very often commented on (much more rarely than lenition of /k/, for instance), but even so there are pronounced differences between speakers of different age groups. Among the oldest speakers there is hardly any conscious awareness of the feature (10% of speakers comment on it, so only 1 in 10). In the middle group the percentage of people who

explicitly mention the merger rises considerably to 38.46%, only to drop to 13.33% again in the youngest speakers, a level which is comparable to that of the oldest interviewees. In contrast to lenition, no one, irrespective of their age, singled out the nurse-sqare merger as being a particularly disagreeable or "annoying" feature of Scouse.

### **9.2.4 Classification**

Realisations of nurse are governed by a number of social factors, and particularly their interactions. The impact of these predictors is statistically more robust than for happy, which is evidenced by the fact that even differences which are very subtle in absolute terms are found to be significant. This is true even though there are many more observations of happy than of nurse (and sqare) in my sample. All of this suggests a generally higher level of salience for nurse in comparison with happy.

Data on style shifting (particularly when sqare realisations are also considered) and conscious awareness clearly show that the merger is not equally salient in the three age groups of speakers. For the oldest speakers it is a marker, awareness of which is only just beginning. In the middle generations, not only style shifting but also hypercorrection is widespread. Together with a steep increase in conscious awareness this shows that the feature is now, for many at least, a stereotype that speakers actively (though rather unsuccessfully) try to avoid producing. Apparently, this boost in salience seems to have been only temporary. Data collected from the youngest speakers in my sample have shown that the nurse-sqare merger has been "reduced" (in terms of social salience) to a marker again in the current generation of young adults, possibly even one that might be on its way to becoming an indicator.

### **9.3 Velar nasal plus: Indicator with prestige option**

### **9.3.1 Age, class, and gender**

Based on accounts in the literature, velar nasal plus was assumed to be one of the less salient features of Scouse, but realisations were nevertheless found to be influenced by at least some extra-linguistic, i.e. social, factors in interesting ways. The analysis of age, for instance, revealed that there is a significant increase in the use of velar nasal plus from the old to the middle-aged speakers, which is in line with the idea that Liverpool English is getting stronger or more local. From the middle to the young group, however, there is no further increase. Rather,

### 9.3 Velar nasal plus: Indicator with prestige option

PDF rates actually drop again. Compared to the oldest speakers in the sample, Scousers aged between 19 and 29 still use velar nasal plus significantly more often, but if they are judged against the generation of their parents, they cannot be said to have more local realisations of this particular consonant as their rates are actually significantly lower.

A closer look at statistical interactions showed that this age difference is actually restricted to middle-class subjects. Only for this socioeconomic class is there a statistically robust rise and subsequent decline of PDF from the old to the middle-aged to the young speakers. For the remaining subjects, on the other hand, the age differences collapse, so in the working class /ŋ(ɡ)/ realisations are actually stable across the timespan investigated in this study. From the old (where working class and middle class are not significantly different) to the middle age group speakers with higher social status seem to have taken up this variable (i.e. they seem to have become somewhat more aware of it) and increased their usage to a value which is then significantly higher than that of their working-class counterparts before subsequently lowering it again a bit so that the classes are, again, no longer statistically distinct among younger Scousers.

Not only social class, but also the gender of participant has an impact on how velar nasal plus is used. The mixed linear effects regression revealed that female speakers have a higher PDF (10.85%), and thus more Scouse realisations, of /ŋ(ɡ)/ than men (8.22%). With female speakers using more local variants than male ones, we have thus another result which does not seem to resonate very well with previous work in sociolinguistics, but I would like to argue further below that this is only apparently so (see §9.3.2).

Investigation of the significant gender X style interaction also showed that women and men differ with respect to the role style has to play. Females have a comparatively high PDF in the formal styles "word list" and "reading" as well as in 'imitation', and only reduce this value somewhat in spontaneous speech. Males, on the other hand, have comparatively low (and statistically identical) values for text reading, free speech, and accent performance (although there is a slight rise from "free" to 'imitation' which is close to significance), and only change their pronunciation (in the same direction as women, i.e. towards more Scouse variants) when they are asked to read out a word list. If one takes spontaneous speech (where there is no significant gender difference) as the baseline it can therefore be said that females seem to be more sensitive to this feature, because (a) they change velar nasal plus pronunciations earlier (reading passage) on the way to the formal end of the style spectrum (whereas men need to reach the most formal register before there is any linguistic reaction), and (b) they re-

### 9 Discussion (production)

act more extremely at the other, most informal, end of the continuum (i.e. accent performance), where the rise in PDF is much less pronounced for male speakers. Both points suggest that women are rather more aware of velar nasal plus than men.

### **9.3.2 Style shifting and awareness**

If the data are pooled across gender and social class, no difference between age groups can be found with respect to style shifting. All speakers, irrespective of their age, have relatively high PDF values (Scouse realisations containing a plosive) when they read out a word list. There is then a decrease towards "normal" reading style, and a further drop towards spontaneous speech, so from the word list to free speech realisations of velar nasal plus actually become linearly more standard. From free speech /ŋ(ɡ)/ pronunciations then become considerably more Scouse again when subjects are asked to perform a particularly strong Liverpool accent (PDF is on about the same level as for text reading). With one negligible exception, all these differences are statistically robust.

While the linear rise from spontaneous speech to text reading to the word list is evidence for some sort of at least subconscious awareness, this is not awareness of velar nasal plus as a *local feature of Liverpool English*, because in this case the slope would be wrong. PDF should go *down* in more formal registers, because this would translate to more standard realisations. The pattern we do actually find therefore rather shows that speakers consider velar nasal plus a characteristic of *careful* speech. This is unexpected, but actually ties in nicely with the fact that, from a purely synchronic point of view, velar nasal plus is a spelling pronunciation. Due to its presence in the orthography, it would not be too surprising if speakers considered realising the plosive the "proper" way to talk, while not doing so would be a sign of informality. As outlined above, my data provide further evidence for this interpretation because they show that women have a (very slightly but nevertheless significantly) higher PDF than men, which incidentally also echoes Knowles's (1973) finding that females used velar nasal plus more frequently than males in his sample (cf. §3.3.1). These results are only compatible with many other sociolinguistic studies if we assume that people consider velar nasal plus primarily a feature of careful speech, because then it would actually be expected that women are more prone to using it. Some additional support for this interpretation can be found: In West Wirral a not insignificant number of speakers endorsed realisations containing a plosive in both word-final and particularly in intervocalic position, probably because of "sheer ignorance or confusion as to what the RP form might actually be" (Newbrook 1999: 101).

### 9.3 Velar nasal plus: Indicator with prestige option

If velar nasal plus is careful speech, why does its use go up when speakers are asked to perform a strong local accent? This task was designed to elicit markedly local speech and the evidence pertaining to the other variables (particularly /k/ lenition, cf. §7.2 and §9.4.3) suggests it succeeded. But of course the accent imitation task was still a highly artificial context and speakers presumably paid a lot of attention to their speech, albeit not in the traditional Labovian sense of the phrase. All the same, getting the stereotype "right" required them to focus on how they were articulating because this stereotypical accent was not their natural one (as is evidenced by the many comments about "falseness", cf. §8.3). It is possible that the increased use of velar nasal plus during accent performance is nothing but an artefact of a setting that required subjects to focus very intensely on their pronunciation. I consider it more likely, however, that in addition to the spelling pronunciation aspect Liverpudlians have at least some awareness of velar nasal plus as a local feature as well. In this case, the style shifting pattern would again be a result of two conflicting evaluations, or norms, that just happen to pull realisations in the same direction (cf. §9.1.3).

This account involves a certain amount of speculation and, just as for happy, the issue deserves a much more detailed discussion than the present study can deliver. Suffice it to say, for the moment, that whatever awareness there is must definitely be subconscious: Not a single subject in the extended secondary dataset (all 38 interviews) mentioned velar nasal plus as a typical feature of Liverpool English.

### **9.3.3 Classification**

Velar nasal plus was originally assumed to be a feature with a rather low amount of salience attached to it. However, its realisations are clearly influenced by social characteristics of the users. The style dimension, too, is particularly intriguing, and forbids the classification of /ŋ(ɡ)/ as an indicator, since there are clear differences between registers. At the same time, velar nasal plus is definitely less salient than the nurse-sqare merger, which shows both in the lower statistical importance of social predictors (both quantitatively and qualitatively) and the lack of overt commentary. In light of consistent, if somewhat difficult to interpret style shifting, I conclude, then, that velar nasal plus is a marker for all three age groups investigated and that younger speakers do neither provide evidence for changing salience of the feature nor do they, in fact, use the local variant more than their parents' generation.

### 9 Discussion (production)

### **9.4 Lenition: From indicator to stereotype**

### **9.4.1 Age**

Among the features investigated in this book, lenition of /k/ is the one that generated statistically robust differences for the widest range of social predictors and their combinations. In fact only frequency of the carrier word was eliminated from the mixed-effects regression model; all the other main effects, as well as all interactions that had been entered into the model, turned out to be significant factors in predicting PDF values of /k/ (which is why only the most important and relevant results will be discussed here). Perhaps surprisingly, age of speaker was not among the significant main effects in the regression model, while t-tests on the raw data did find significant age differences, at least between the young speakers and each of the other two groups. Scousers aged between 56 and 85 have mean PDF values comparable to speakers who are between 30 and 55 years old, so from a statistical point of view, and in this particular context, the two groups can actually be considered as one. Younger Liverpudlians exhibit a significantly higher mean PDF than both speakers of their parents' or grandparents' generation. The apparent contradiction between the raw data and the mixed-effects regression has been shown to be mostly due to *like* (as a discourse marker and quotative particle), because, among the youngest speakers, this word is both considerably more frequent and also realised with a higher average PDF than in the other two groups.

This special behaviour of *like* in the young group was filtered out by the mixedeffects model since it had a random intercept for carrier word. While this makes sense in a way (we do not necessarily want a single lexical item to dominate the data in such a way), it also seems somewhat unfortunate. After all, the fact that young Liverpudlians frequently say [laɪç] (or any other words that they are more likely to realise with a fricative than older speakers) probably does contribute considerably to many laypersons' impression that Scouse is getting stronger since lenition is not only one of the best known but also most stigmatised features (cf. §9.4.4). Interestingly, the same differences (non-significant between old and middle, but significant between middle and young group) also surface when observations pertaining to *like* are removed from the dataset altogether, so *like* is clearly not the only factor, and young Liverpudlians really do seem to be Scouser than those of the middle-aged and old group.

Zooming in a bit reveals that this change has not happened in quite the same way in the two genders. For women, the increase in PDF actually already happens from the old to the middle generation. From the middle-aged to the young

### 9.4 Lenition: From indicator to stereotype

speakers there is then only a slight (and non-significant) further increase of PDF, so that young female Scousers do not use lenition more than their parents' generation already did. Male speakers, on the other hand, start out with very high values of lenition in the old generation, drop to a considerably and significantly lower level in the middle group, and then increase their usage of Scouse variants again from the middle-aged to the young speakers. With respect to /k/ lenition, young men in Liverpool have thus completed a sort of revival or 'back-to-theroots' process.

### **9.4.2 Gender and class**

Note also that the gender difference is not quite the same within the respective age groups. It should be noted that the differences are subtle, though: /k/ realisations of women and men are statistically distinct in all three generations of speakers. However, the difference is slightly less robust in the middle group, and, what is more, women have actually higher PDF values than men in this generation. Generally speaking though, females have *lower* PDF means than males, so women use less lenition than men, which is just what one would expect for a salient and stigmatised variable. The fact that women are more Scouse than men in the middle group might therefore suggest that the variable has lost salience in this generation, but additional evidence refutes this hypothesis (see §9.4.4). Women just seem to have been in the vanguard of this change (remember that their PDF has risen systematically from the old to the youngest speakers, whereas the changes in male PDF are non-linear), despite the fact that lenition is a salient non-standard feature, which one would usually rather expect women to shun. This is indeed a strange result that does not lend itself to straightforward interpretation. It would be interesting to see whether it is something that just shows up in my sample due to the particular individuals that were recruited or whether it could be replicated and really needs an explanation.

On a different note, it is interesting that the gender difference is not significant when subjects perform a strong Scouse accent (where PDF is very high in both genders), which can be seen as evidence that both women and men (subconsciously?) consider lenition as part of the Scouse stereotype. This result is very neatly mirrored when the data are divided according to social class of the speaker. The mixed linear effects regression showed that, all other things being equal, middle-class subjects have lower PDF rates and thus more standard realisations of /k/ than working-class Liverpudlians, which is the expected outcome for a salient variable. Just as with gender, the class difference is highly significant in all speaking styles except accent imitation (where PDF means are again

### 9 Discussion (production)

highest), which shows that the strong association of /k/ lenition with a stereotypical Scouse accent is not only shared among Liverpudlians of both genders, but also across different socioeconomic classes.

However, looking at how the class difference develops across the three generations of speakers investigated here is even more fascinating. For the oldest speakers, there is actually *no* significant difference in the use of lenition between working-class and middle-class Liverpudlians. In the middle group the difference is already highly significant, and for the youngest speakers this is even more true. The reason for this is that, if we take the oldest speakers as the baseline, middleclass PDF values *de*crease linearly in apparent time, whereas working-class PDF actually *in*creases with the same regularity. As far as /k/ lenition is concerned, the claim that Scouse is getting Scouser is thus only true for working-class speakers; middle-class realisations of /k/ have actually become more standard in the last few decades. This final point indicates that the salience of this variable has increased among middle-class speakers: they are more aware of lenition (and its non-standardness) and therefore try to avoid it. To explain the opposite trend in the working class one could assume that salience in this group has simultaneously decreased, but this is not what is happening (cf. §9.4.4). Rather, /k/ lenition must have acquired covert prestige as a marker of local identity. For Scousers of lower socioeconomic classes this covert prestige seems to be more important than the social stigma attached to it, whereas for middle-class speakers priorities are reversed.

### **9.4.3 Style shifting**

Style shifting pertaining to /k/ lenition reveals highly interesting differences between the age groups, even more so than for nurse. Old and middle-aged speakers not only have PDF values that add up to roughly the same grand mean (cf. §9.4.1), they also end up with /k/ pronunciations that are virtually identical in (almost) all individual speech styles analysed in this study. Neither group has any differences between the registers word list, text reading, and spontaneous speech. In all three styles /k/ is realised in a comparatively standard-like way. Only when it comes to accent imitation is there a steep rise of PDF towards more fricativelike local variants. These two groups of speakers thus have, at best, a two-way style distinction (stereotypical accent vs. everything else), so their awareness of the variable, while not nonexistent, seems to be limited. Young Scousers, however, presents a textbook case of style shifting as we would expect it for a socially meaningful variable: There is a steady, statistically significant, and almost perfectly linear increase of PDF from the most formal to the least formal register.

### 9.4 Lenition: From indicator to stereotype

Compared to the other two groups, the youngest speakers in my sample manipulate lenition in a much more fine-grained way, which shows that awareness has reached a level in this group that is considerably higher than for older Liverpudlians.

It has already been pointed out above that women show more awareness of lenition than men do. This higher degree of sensitivity also shows in (slightly) different style shifting patterns. Female speakers exhibit more systematic and more pronounced style differences than those that are observed for male subjects, so they are not only more sensitive to /k/ lenition in general (which would just translate to lower absolute PDF values, but not necessarily different style shifting patterns). With respect to lenited variants of /k/ women also are more susceptible to the style dimension. An additional relevant point here is that when the data are split up along the gender dimension, the youngest speakers are still the ones that show the most systematic style shifting pattern, and this is true for both women *and* men, which shows that the increase in awareness along the age dimension is not limited to just one of the two genders, but is really primarily a question of age. The fact that style shifting patterns are least different in the young group is further evidence for the idea that awareness of lenition is more universal in this generation than in the other two.

The interaction of style, age, and social class is somewhat less straightforward to interpret. First of all, old middle and middle-aged working-class subjects have a significant drop in PDF from list/reading to spontaneous speech, which means that they use more Scouse variants in the more formal registers than in free speech. This looks very much like the hypercorrection that was observed for nurse (cf. §9.3.2), but it is difficult to see why it would affect these two subgroups in particular. Generally speaking though, there is a class difference in that middle-class speakers mostly distinguish performance of a strong accent from everything else (in the young group, too), while working-class speakers show more pronounced (and, for the youngest speakers, also more systematic and fine-grained) style differences.

Such a result is unexpected because it could be taken to imply that middle-class speakers pay less attention than their working-class counterparts to how often they use stigmatised variants in a particular register. I believe, however, that this is not the case. It has to be taken into account that the mean PDF values of middleclass speakers, especially in the middle and the young generation, are relatively low across the board (accent imitation excepted), and considerably lower than even the most standard-like values measured for the working class. I believe that middle-class Liverpudlians just try to avoid lenited /k/ variants altogether, even

### 9 Discussion (production)

in spontaneous speech, and that they just cannot get much more standard than they already are, even if they wanted to. They *can* produce lenited variants, but they only do so when being asked to reproduce the stereotype. In more natural speech their normal realisation is already so close to their lower (i.e. "standard") limit that there is just no room left for any further style shifting away from the local variant.

### **9.4.4 Awareness and attitudes**

Lenition of /k/ attracts, by far, the largest number of explicit comments and evaluations in my sample, which is clear evidence for the fact that it is considerably more salient than the other three variables investigated in this book. There are, however, pronounced differences between the three generations. Among the oldest speakers, lenition is hardly mentioned at all, less than one in four subjects mention this feature. In the middle-aged group this rate has already risen considerably to around 70%, and when it comes to the youngest Scousers in the sample, each and every one of them expresses conscious awareness of lenition in velar plosives, so the variable has reached full and universal stereotype status. Many speakers (particularly in the youngest generation) are able to provide comparatively detailed accounts of the phenomenon that include fairly accurate descriptions of the place of articulation and the systematic nature of the variable (as opposed to isolated examples of individual lexical items).

It is not quite clear *why* awareness has increased in the way that it has. This might be due to the fact that, impressionistically at least, contemporary comedians frequently – and primarily – use this particular feature to imitate or make fun of the Liverpool accent. One could assume that younger speakers are more exposed to these recent performances than people in, say, their 60s, but at this point this idea is mere speculation. Furthermore, a separate study would first have to investigate whether performances in the media and on stage really *have* changed in the last decades as to which features they focus on. After all, it is in principle quite possible that /k/ lenition was already part of the external stereotype of Scouse in the 50s and 60s (it is, for instance, mentioned in the introduction to the first *Lern Yerself Scouse* volume). We could also argue that increasing awareness in younger speakers is based on the changing usage of the variable. For instance, people's awareness of non-standard variants might go up when they realise that middle-class speakers increasingly start to avoid them. However, this would lead to the chicken and egg problem commonly encountered in salience research (cf. §4.1.1): if awareness goes up because usage changes, then what triggers change in usage in the first place? Whatever the reason for the

### 9.4 Lenition: From indicator to stereotype

increase in conscious awareness is, explicit comments clearly show that lenition of /k/ is even more of a stereotype for younger Liverpudlians than it is for the older generations.

Why, then, do younger Liverpudlians use this feature more than their parents or grandparents despite the fact that they know about it? A different attitude towards lenition would be an option, but this is not what we find. The majority of younger and older speakers alike explained that they themselves often found very strong Scouse accents harsh, unpleasant, or intimidating. Lenition of velar plosives is strongly associated with these pronounced Liverpool accents and considered one of its most distinctive features. Across all three generations, subjects judge it rather negatively ("annoying", 'makes you unintelligible'), possibly because at least some of them have personal experience of outsiders using this variable to make fun of Liverpudlians. Higher proportions of lenited variants among younger Scousers can thus *not* be explained by a different (overt) attitude towards the feature.

Another explanation could be that young speakers just cannot help using lenition. The regular style shifting that was found, however, rather suggests that particularly younger speakers can at least sub-consciously control their usage of the local variant quite well. It is possible that some Scousers are *generally* aware of the variable but not, for some reason, of its presence *in their own speech*. There is some anecdotal evidence in my data that supports this idea, like the young female working-class speaker who reports not using lenition at all when in fact she uses fricative variants almost categorically. It has to be noted, though, that this type of linguistic insecurity, while not restricted to this one speaker, does not seem to be the rule (especially with respect to the male speakers). Just as outlined above for the class differences (cf. §9.4.2), I would therefore argue that the higher use of lenition among the younger speakers is primarily due to the covert prestige that lenited variants appear to have acquired.

### **9.4.5 Classification**

Lenition of /k/ shows precisely the kind of social stratification that one would expect a sociolinguistically salient variable to produce. In particular, non-standard realisations are significantly less common among female and middle-class speakers. Inter-group differences in style shifting suggest that for the old and the middle-aged speakers (sub-conscious) awareness is lower than in the young group because the former show only limited style awareness, while the latter present a textbook case of Labovian style shifting, with non-standard variants getting consistently and linearly more likely the more informal the communicative context.

### 9 Discussion (production)

Data on explicit comments and judgements further showed that conscious awareness increases in a linear fashion from the oldest to the youngest Scousers. My data thus suggest that lenition of /k/ has developed from a (beginning) marker in the old group (where only a minority is consciously aware of the variable), to a consolidated marker (for the minority) or stereotype (for about three out of four speakers) in the middle generation, and then finally to a fully-fledged and universal stereotype in the young group of speakers, where not only *every* speaker knows about the feature but where style shifting is also most consistent and regular. Liverpudlians aged 29 and younger are therefore not only 'more Scouse' than their parents and grandparents with respect to this variable, but they are also the ones that are most aware of this feature of Liverpool English.

### **9.5 Summary**

People of all age groups closely link Scouse to their local identity. Generally speaking, they are both aware and proud of its distinctness as an accent, although some subjects also see this as something that can be problematic, because they know about the negative connotations that a Scouse accent can carry, particularly for outsiders. To a degree, some of these external stereotypes (and their evaluation!) seem to have been internalised, as when Liverpudlians base their list of typical features of their own accent on stereotypical performances by outsiders. On the whole, inside evaluations are often ambivalent: "Light" accents are seen as adding an acceptable amount of local flavour and carrying positive connotations such as down-to-earthness, while extremely "strong" Scouse accents receive much less favourable judgements (this aspect is also reported in De Lyon 1981: 33, often because they appear as exaggerated, false, and inauthentic. Old and middle-aged Liverpudlians believe these "exaggerated" accents to be more common among younger speakers, but this verdict is not shared by young Scousers who appear to reject 'plastic' accents just as much as the older subjects (interestingly, one subject interviewed by De Lyon in 1979 claimed already that some Liverpudlians deliberately "exaggerated" the accent, cf. De Lyon 1981: 30).

Norms and attitudes towards Scouse therefore seem to have remained largely stable across the three generations of speakers investigated in this book. All the same, there is some evidence that middle-aged speakers seem to be particularly sensitive to the negative image of Scouse, which shows in the hypercorrection that these speakers exhibit for the two salient variables nurse and /k/. Arguably, this is because the formative years of these speakers (the 70s and 80s) coincided with the period when the economic situation and the national image of Liverpool

### 9.5 Summary

as a city was at its historic low. For the youngest speakers, quite the opposite is true. While the city is still among the most deprived in the country, the participants in the young group have only ever seen things improving a bit every year. They know about the negative image of their city and their accent, but at least to a certain degree they consider these attitudes to be outdated and unjustified. Pride in their city and the will to express their local identity linguistically seem to be strong enough that the covert prestige of variables such as the nursesqare merger and /k/ lenition is at least as (and possibly more) important than the social stigma attached to them.

However, young Scousers are not more Scouse in every respect. Rather, they use (highly) salient markers and stereotypes (nurse and /k/ lenition in my sample) more often and extensively than their parents or grandparents, because that alone is already enough to convey a strong local identity (though it has to be said that intonation - impressionistically at least - also plays a crucial role here and deserves a study of its own). Non-salient features, on the other hand, are either neglected or even sub-consciously used for other purposes: Their non-salience allows speakers to use them as a means of expression of a regional identity without noticeably deviating from their more local accent. Thus, they enable speakers "to appear outward-looking or more cosmopolitan" without signalling "disloyalty to local norms" or, in particular, "'snobishness'" (Foulkes & Docherty 1999: 13–14). In my sample, this is precisely what seems to be happening to happy, which is becoming less instead of more Scouse (and thus more "northern") in apparent time.

While the four variables analysed in this book do not carry identical amounts of social salience in the three age groups, their relative ordering is the same, irrespective of speaker age: (1) happy is the least salient one in the set, parts of the style differences can be explained phonetically although some sub-conscious shifting must also be involved. (2) Velar nasal plus is very similar to happy, but the style differences are more pronounced, phonetic reasons are less available as explanatory factors, and some subtle gender differences can be detected, all of which indicates slightly higher social salience than for happy. (3) nurse shows a more detailed and more robust social distribution than both happy and /ŋ(ɡ)/, more consistent style shifting, and, most importantly, it attracts at least a small amount of explicit commentary, which is clear evidence for a considerably higher degree of sociolinguistic salience. (4) /k/ lenition, finally, is the variable which not only generates the most significant differences in usage among social groups and the most systematic style shifting patterns, but it is also the one that most subjects consciously know about (in every generation). As the feature that is

### 9 Discussion (production)

clearly a stereotype and even a shibboleth for many, or even most, Liverpudlians it is without a doubt the most socially salient variable investigated in the context of this study.

## **10 Experiment design**

Based on a detailed analysis of production data, the first part of this study has independently established the sociolinguistic salience of happy-tensing, velar nasal plus, the nurse-sqare merger, and lenition of /k/. Knowing they can be ordered in this way (from least to most salient) it is now possible to test the hypothesis that salience is a crucial factor in exemplar priming experiments. Perception of these variables was analysed with the help of an online test, the detailed methodology of which is described below.

### **10.1 Stimuli**

### **10.1.1 Stimuli sentences and frequency of keywords**

To ensure comparability, stimuli were designed in a way similar to that of Hay, Nolan, et al. 2006 and Niedzielski 1999. Six keywords for each of the four variables were taken from the word list that had been used to elicit production data (see appendix C). In the test, the keywords appeared twice within complete sentences, once sentence-finally and once sentence-medially. This way it was possible to investigate whether having to hold the relevant sound in memory had an impact on subjects' responses (cf. Hay, Nolan, et al. 2006). Hay, Nolan, et al. (2006) noted a problem in their methodology, namely the fact that their stimuli confounded the position of the keyword and the total length of the sentence it was embedded in. Since sentences with the keyword in the middle were always (considerably) longer than the corresponding sentences with the keyword at the end there was no way of determining whether differences found were due to the fact that participants had to hold the sound in memory or that the longer sentence just contained more phonetic material, which might have activated further (or different!) exemplars.

In this study, care was therefore taken to make sure that all stimuli sentences were (roughly) equal in length (measured in words). Total duration (in seconds and milliseconds) of the final stimuli was also measured and a paired t-test revealed that stimuli sentences with the keyword in the middle were not significantly longer than sentences where the keyword was at the end (t(23) = -0.129,

### 10 Experiment design

p = 0.898). For /ŋ(ɡ)/ and /k/, a further criterion was to have an equal number of words with the variable in intervocalic and in word-final position. This was to match the most prominent phonological contexts that these variables were investigated in in production and to be able to discover any potential differences in priming related to this criterion. Occurrences of the other three test variables were avoided in the stimuli sentences of the fourth variable. An example pair is given below (see appendix D for the complete list):

Key words from the original list were selected in such a way that there was a continuum from very high to very low frequency words. Frequency categorisation was initially based on occurrences in the BNC (spoken language section only). Table 10.1 provides an overview of the keywords used. All figures are absolute occurrences in the BNC (spoken), i.e. relative occurrences per 10 million words.These figures were later replaced by frequencies based on SUBTLEX-UK, a 200+ million word corpus of subtitles collected from BBC broadcasts (taken from 9 different channels) in the years 2010–2012. SUBTLEX-UK frequencies were preferred because they have been found to explain more variance than, for example, BNC frequencies in psycholinguistic experiments focussing on things such as lexical decision reaction times (Van Heuven et al. 2014). According to Van Heuven et al. (2014), one of the most popular frequency measures, frequency per million words, comes with a number of problems, especially for low frequency words. They propose an alternative measure called the Zipf scale, the values of which are calculated as follows:

$$\text{Zipf score} = \log(n) + 3 \tag{10.1}$$

Where *n* is the absolute frequency in a 1 million word corpus. This logarithmic scale produces values of '1' for words that occur once in 100 million words, '2' for words that occur once in 10 million words, '3' for words that occur once in 1 million words, etc., with a range of about 1 (very low frequency words) to 6 or 7 (very high frequency words). The actual equation used in practice is slightly more complex in order to also assign Zipf scores to words that have an absolute frequency of 0 in the corpus, but this does not drastically change the interpretation of the Zipf scores as outlined just above (cf. Van Heuven et al. 2014). The Zipf scores used in this study are based on the frequencies in SUBTLEX-UK as a whole (instead of one of the two sub-corpora "CBeebies" (pre-school children)

and "CBBC" (primary school audience), for which separate Zipf values are also available).

Table 10.1: BNC and SUBTLEX-UK frequencies of keywords in the perception test

The author is aware of the fact that this list probably leaves much to be desired from the point of view of linguistic frequency research. Ideally, there would have been two words each in more clearly (and more consistently) defined high, middle and low frequency ranges for every variable investigated: Van Heuven et al. (2014) draw the line between low frequency and high frequency words somewhere between Zipf values 3 and 4, which would classify only 1 in 6 of the carrier words as low frequency and the remainder as high frequency. This was difficult, however, since the group of possible keywords was already restricted by the word list that had been used in the interview. It should be borne in mind, however, that frequency is only of secondary interest in this study, and the opportunity to possibly find connections between use and perception of particular words was deemed more relevant to the task at hand. The whole design of the experiment would have looked different if frequency had been of central importance. For instance, more keywords would be needed, because with only 6 words (per variable) chances are high that any effects of frequency that might be found

### 10 Experiment design

are, at least in part, *lexical* effects of individual words rather than (generalisable) frequency effects. Anything this study might find about frequency effects should therefore be considered a bonus rather than one of the main points.

There were thus a total of 48 stimuli sentences in the perception test, with the 12 test tokens of one variable simultaneously functioning as dummies for the other three. These sentences were recorded by a phonetician in her late twenties who is originally from East Central Manchester. She used her native Mancunian accent, meaning that nurse was realised as [ɜ:], happy as [ɪ] (phrase-internally) or [ə] (phrase-finally), velar nasal plus as [ŋɡ]1 and /k/ as [k].

The stimuli participants had to choose from were created in Praat. A script extracted the key word from every sentence, manipulated the relevant sound and saved the resulting four different versions of the word. This study differs from many previous studies, e.g. Hay, Nolan, et al. 2006 or Niedzielski 1999, in that participants were presented with whole words *containing* manipulated sounds instead of just individual vowels. This choice was made because (a) it made the experimental situation ever so slightly less artificial, and (b) the manipulation of /k/ was based on differing ratios of silence and friction, and therefore depended on the /k/ having some immediately preceding phonetic material. A second deviation from the seminal studies concerns the number of answer tokens. Both Niedzielski and Hay, Nolan, et al. presented their participants with a 6-step continuum, but the present study had only 4 options that listeners could choose from. This reduction was done for two reasons. Firstly, creating more than 4 different realisations that can be reliably distinguished by non-experts would have been rather challenging in the case of velar nasal plus and /k/ lenition. Since it was deemed essential to ensure comparability between the consonantal and the vocalic variables, the number of answer tokens was therefore limited to 4 for the whole experiment. Secondly (and more importantly), it is not at all clear whether non-linguists are even able to make full use of an answer continuum that consists of 6 tokens which differ only in rather fine phonetic details. Actually, Niedzielski 1999 ended up limiting her analysis to the 3 "middle" tokens of her continuum because subjects had almost never chosen one of the other 3 options (cf. Niedzielski 1999: 64–65). As far as the present study is concerned, it was therefore decided that a 4-step continuum was difficult enough, and that in inflating the amount of answer tokens one would run the risk of potentially asking too much of the

1Using velar nasal plus as a variable in a priming test where the conditions are "Liverpool" and "Manchester" is problematic, because velar nasal plus is actually present in both accents. See §12.4 for an explanation why I still think it was justified to use this variable in this priming experiment.

### 10.1 Stimuli

average participant. An even number of stimuli was chosen to "force" listeners to one side of the spectrum (more Mancunian or more Liverpudlian).

### **10.1.2 Vowel stimuli**

Vowel stimuli were created using a script that was heavily inspired by one written by Styler (2008). First of all, the recording was downsampled to 11 kHz. The vowels in the key words were then extracted individually and run through sourcefilter synthesis in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2015). An LPC (prediction order 12, window length 25 milliseconds, time step 5 milliseconds, pre-emphasis frequency 50 Hz) and a formant object (maximum number of formants 5, maximum formant frequency 5500 Hz, window length 25 milliseconds, pre-emphasis frequency 50 Hz) were created, both using the Burg algorithm. The downsampled vowel was then inverse-filtered with the LPC, which results in a "reconstruction" of the pure source sound as generated by the vocal folds of the speaker. By applying the formant filter (which simulates vocal tract shape) to this reconstructed source a vowel can be re-synthesised that is almost identical to the natural one in the recording (token 2 was created this way). If the filter (i.e. the formant structure) is manipulated, a synthesised vowel is generated that is acoustically and perceptually different from the original, but most of the time still fairly natural sounding. The re-synthesised vowel was then upsampled again and spliced back into the carrier word. F1 and F2 of nurse and happy were manipulated using this method. The relevant values were chosen in such a way that there was roughly equal perceptual distance (auditory judgement by the author) between any two adjacent vowels.

Table 10.2: Filter settings used in vowel resynthesis (in Hz)

Table 10.2 summarises the final parameters, and Figure 10.1 illustrates the result for one set of nurse tokens. There was thus a continuum from stimulus 1 (hyper-Mancunian), to 2 (actual) and 3 (Scouse), to stimulus 4 (hyper-Scouse).

### 10 Experiment design

Figure 10.1: Formant tracks of *fur* tokens

The formant structure of stimulus 2 was not modified, but still re-synthesised so as not to stick out as the only completely natural recording. For nurse stimulus 1 was thus higher and further back than the speaker's natural realisation, while stimuli 3 and 4 were both fronted and lowered to varying degrees. With respect to happy, stimulus 1 was lowered and centralised, while stimuli 3 and 4 were higher and fronter than the vowel that actually occurred in the recordings. Participants always heard the re-synthesised words in the same order (1 to 4). Unfortunately, it was not possible to synthesise stimuli of satisfactory quality from the sentences that had happy in phrase-final position (where it was typically realised as [ə], and often articulated with breathy voice). For this reason, answer tokens for these sentences were taken from the equivalent recordings where happy occurred in the middle of the sentence (and in the same carrier word). Crucially, however, the realisation of happy in the stimulus sentence itself was not altered. With hindsight, this should have been avoided as this procedure created a confound with the independent variable 'position of keyword in sentence' (cf. §11.1).

### **10.1.3 Consonant stimuli**

An equivalent procedure was developed for the consonants /ŋ(ɡ)/ and /k/. The link between those two in the context of this study is that the proportion of friction/aspiration is higher in the Scouse than in the standard British English variants, and this criterion was used to build a continuum similar to the one created for the two vowels. Once more, the goal was to create roughly equal perceptual

10.1 Stimuli

distance (again checked auditorily by the author) between any two tokens, just as for the re-synthesised vowels. For every keyword a TextGrid was prepared which marked phases of aspiration, burst, and silence (for /k/) or nasality (for /ŋ(ɡ)/) respectively (cf. Figure 10.2). For /ŋ(ɡ)/, a script written by the author of this study then

Figure 10.2: Waveform and TextGrid for *chicken* stimuli

Stimulus 4 was the full, unaltered velar nasal plus realisation [ŋɡ]. To make the velar nasal plus sentences comparable to those of the other variables, stimulus 2 was afterwards copied back into the sentence to replace the natural [ŋɡ] realisation. There was thus no voiced velar plosive present in the sentences subjects heard, and the continuum of stimuli was structured in the same way as those for the vowels and for /k/ in the sense that stimulus number 2 was the objectively most accurate choice that corresponded best to the sound actually used in the sentence.

Stimulus 2 for /k/ was the actual released plosive [k] as it occurred in the sentence recordings. The hyper-Mancunian stimulus was created from this by

### 10 Experiment design

cutting the aspiration, but leaving in the burst. The speaker had also recorded all the /k/ sentences using the Scouse fricative variants. The frication from these variants was pasted into the place of the original aspiration to form an affricate stimulus 3 (to make the result more natural sounding half of the closure phase was also deleted). Stimulus 4, finally, had the whole plosive (silence, burst, and aspiration) replaced by the fricative by way of removing remaining silence and burst from stimulus 3.

For both /ŋ(ɡ)/ and /k/, asymmetrical cross-fading and intensity adaptation was applied in intervocalic environments to create a smoother and less artificial transition from the nasal or the aspiration-less plosive to the following vowel in the hyper-Mancunian tokens (using a 25 milliseconds fade-in interval for the vowel and 50 milliseconds of overlap between phonemes when concatenating). Table 10.3 provides an overview of the consonantal stimuli.

Table 10.3: Structure of consonant stimuli

A small pilot study was run among linguists of the English Seminar at the University of Freiburg to make sure the stimuli (both the vocalic and the consonantal ones) were (a) sufficiently natural-sounding, and (b) equally distant from one another in perceptual terms. This pilot study did not reveal any problems, so the investigation proper was carried out using these stimuli.

### **10.2 Presentation**

### **10.2.1 Online platform**

The actual test was administered online using *SoSciSurvey.de* (2015), a professional tool for academic online surveys and questionnaires. The platform uses flash to play audio and video files. Although declining in importance, flash is still installed on most desktop and laptop computers (though not on tablets and smartphones) so the vast majority of potential subjects should have had no technical problems related to the website. Nevertheless, participants first of all had

10.2 Presentation

to answer a filter question to make sure they had flash installed and activated and could actually play the sound recordings. Subjects were given the hint that they were going to hear the name of a type of bird and the questionnaire then used the flash plug-in to play a short sound file of the speaker saying *raven*. Participants then typed in the word they had heard. Wrong answers to this test question prevented the user from progressing in the questionnaire. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The control group was (correctly) told that the speaker they were going to listen to was from Manchester. The other group was led to believe that the speaker was from Liverpool (about 1 in 3 of the participants who lived outside of Liverpool actually believed this). Depending on which group subjects had been assigned to, "Manchester" or "Liverpool" was displayed at the top of every page as a reminder (cf. Figure 10.3).

Figure 10.3: Online questionnaire - training item

After a couple of practice items (the results of which did not enter the analysis) participants were presented with 6 groups of 8 test tokens each. Both the

### 10 Experiment design

order of the groups and the order of the items within each group was randomised. For every sentence, subjects were asked to pay special attention to the (part of the) word that was underlined. The sound files that were played had been created using another Praat script written by the author which pasted the stimulus sentence together with the resynthesised keywords and added bits of silence in between (Figure 10.4 visualises the structure).

Figure 10.4: Timing of perception stimuli

Each sentence was presented on a separate page of the questionnaire. Participants would see the sentence first for 1.5 seconds before the playback started automatically. After the recording of the sentence had finished playing, participants heard the four resynthesised words (introduced by "one", "two", "three", "'four" to avoid confusion2 ) with 1.5 seconds of silence in between words, and were asked to choose the one that they thought corresponded most closely to the sound in the test sentence. Participants could either choose a sound by clicking on a button or by pressing "1", "2", "3", or "4" on their keyboard. Both the sentence and the resynthesised sounds were only played once. As soon as the subject had clicked on the button of their choice (or pressed the relevant key) the next sentence was automatically presented.

2The token numbers were recorded by a different female speaker (aged 26). This was not ideal as it is possible that the accent of the other speaker might have influenced participants. Incidentally, however, Hay & Drager were faced with the same problem and correctly point out that any effect the second speaker *might* have had would manifest itself in identical fashion in *both* experimental conditions and should therefore not be able to confound the priming effect (cf. Hay & Drager 2010: 871 and 889).

10.2 Presentation

### **10.2.2 Reaction times**

Reaction times were also recorded. These have to be taken with a grain of salt in the context of an online survey, as a number of external factors (skill in using a mouse etc.) add a lot of variance. The potentially most important factor – speed of internet connection – can be ruled out as a confounding variable, however. This is because the platform uses JavaScript to send each subset of stimuli to the computer of the subject. Playback of the sound files does not start before all bits of the question have been downloaded. RT measurements (with an accuracy of about 10 milliseconds) are then taken locally on the participant's computer before being bundled and sent back to the server. No loading from the server takes place in between stimuli (cf. *SoSciSurvey.de* 2015). While there is still some room for variation between different hardware configurations in terms of timing accuracy and the like, there is no reason to assume that one subgroup of participants in particular would be affected in a significantly different way, so overall such unwanted effects can be hoped to cancel out. Furthermore, reaction times were not analysed as a dependent variable in its own right, but "merely" served to filter responses in the way described below.

The platform *SoSciSurvey.de* does come with some technical limitations, however, since it is not primarily designed for tests requiring RT measurements. Unfortunately, it is neither possible to define a time window outside of which participants cannot enter a response nor to specify when the reaction time clock starts. Technically speaking, RT measurements are really measurements of how long a subject spent on a particular page of the questionnaire. Measuring thus starts automatically once the page is loaded and stops when the next page is accessed (which, in this study, happened automatically once an answer had been selected). "Real" reaction times are arrived at by substracting the total duration of each audio file from the time spent on the respective page.

As a consequence of these restrictions, it was possible for subjects to make their choice at any time, including *before* the recording had actually finished even though the instructions spelled out that participants should listen to all answer options first. It would have been quite easy to filter out all of these premature answers by simply eliminating all observations with negative RTs from the dataset. This course of action was not taken for two reasons. The first one is comparability with previous research. Neither Niedzielski 1999 nor Hay, Warren, et al. 2006; Hay & Drager 2010 even recorded reaction times and responses were given on a physical answer sheet so it is quite possible that these studies were, in part, based on answers that had been given before subjects had listened to all of their options. The second, more important reason, is that it does not necessarily

### 10 Experiment design

make sense to exclude an answer just because the subject did not listen to all resynthesised sounds first. After all, this study is interested in finding out how (stereotypical) expectations influence people's perception. The claim that at least some expectations and attitudes will prime people to perceive particular sounds *implies* that at least to a certain extent the choice is already made before subjects can really process the physical signal and this might well show in negative RTs. Many people might simply be reluctant to wait for the end of the recording if they already "know" the answer or if they have already heard the option that they think is the best match. Ignoring negative RTs might then result in involuntarily eliminating (parts of) the priming effect one is interested in from the dataset – which might be a reason why previous studies have not even bothered with reaction times in the first place.