Scouse is the accent and dialect of English found in the north-western English city of Liverpool and in some adjoining urban areas of Merseyside. The Scouse accent is highly distinctive and sounds wholly different from the accents used in the neighbouring regions of Cheshire and rural Lancashire. Inhabitants of Liverpool are called Liverpudlians, but are more often described by the slang term Scousers.
   The word Scouse was originally a variation of lobscouse (probably from the north German sailor's dish Labskaus), the name of a traditional dish of Scouse made with lamb stew mixed with hardtack eaten by sailors. Alternative recipes have included beef and thickened with the gelatin source found in cowheel or pig trotter in addition to various root vegetables. Other sources suggest that "labskaus" is a Norwegian term ("lapskaus" in Norwegian), and considering the number of Merseyside place-names ending in "-by" (Formby, Crosby, Kirkby, Greasby, Pensby, Roby), a Viking rather than German source must be considered. Various spellings can still be traced, including "lobscows" from Wales, and some families refer to this stew as "lobby" rather than scouse. In Leigh, between Liverpool and Manchester, there's even a "Lobby shop". The dish was traditionally the fare of the poor people, using the cheapest cuts of meat available, and indeed when no meat at all was available scouse was still made, but this "vegetarian" version was known as "blind scouse". The term remained a purely local word until its popularisation in the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part, which some also believe to have introduced stereotypes about Liverpudlians.
   The roots of the accent can be traced back to the large numbers of immigrants into the Liverpool area in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries including those from the Isle of Man, Wales, Scotland and, most substantially, Ireland. The influence of these different speech patterns became apparent in Liverpool, distinguishing the accent of its people from those of the surrounding Lancashire and Cheshire areas. It is only recently that Scouse has been treated as a cohesive accent/dialect; for many years, Liverpool was simply seen as a melting pot of different accents with no one to call its own. The Survey of English Dialects ignored Liverpool completely, and the dialect researcher Ellis said that Liverpool [andBirkenhead] had "no dialect proper".

Phonology

Consonants

• The /k/ phoneme is often pronounced [x], especially at the end of a word, so that back [bax] sounds like German Bach and lock [lɒx] sounds like Scottish English loch. In other positions /k/ may be realised as an affricate [kx].
• There are several possibilities for the /t/ phoneme in Scouse. In some contexts, it may be realised as an alveolar slit fricative, [θ̠] or as a similar affricate [tθ̠]; these sounds may sound like [s] and [ts] respectively. The sounds [s] and [ts] themselves may also be used. Hence right may be heard as rice or rights.
• In some words, for example but and what, the final /t/ may be replaced by [h] or a flap [ɾ], which may be heard as an /r/.
• More rarely, lenition can also affect /p/, which may be realised as a bilabial fricative [ɸ], and /d/, which undergoes lenition similar to that of /t/, producing a voiced slit fricative [ð̠] or affricate [dð̠]. (Marotta and Barth 2005) The th sounds /θ, ð/ may be pronounced as dental [t,d]. This feature is shared with Hiberno-English.

Vowels