ILLUSTRATIONS OF THE IPA Liverpool English

Liverpool English (LE) is the variety of English spoken in Liverpool and much of the surrounding county of Merseyside, in the north-west of England. After London, the north-west of England is the most densely populated of all regions in England and Wales, with the population of Liverpool standing at around 450,000. LE itself is said to have developed in the middle of the 19th century, after rapid immigration from Ireland during the Irish potato famines of 1845–1847 (see Knowles 1973). Arguably as a result of this immigration, as we will see, there are some similarities between LE’s phonological system and those of Irish Englishes. Of course, as we might expect, the phonological system of LE maintains its connection with other northern Englishes, too. There is a greater amount of previous work on LE than on many other accents of British English, particularly other varieties of the north-west of the country. The earliest systematic study of LE, Knowles (1973), remains the seminal work and is where the widest range of phonological features is considered. Later work, including De Lyon (1981), Honeybone (2001), Sangster (2001) and Watson (2006, 2007), has tended to restrict its focus to a smaller number of variables which are amongst the variety’s most characteristic features. This article bases most of its descriptive detail on data gathered during fieldwork carried out by the author (see Watson 2007), but at times information is gleaned from elsewhere (most notably Knowles ’ early work) to provide comparison. The transcription of the reading passage is based on the speech of a 21-year-old working-class female speaker who was born in the district of Netherton, in the north of Liverpool, and has always lived there. She self-identifies as having a ‘broad ’ Liverpool accent, although the difficulty in remaining objective about such labels should be acknowledged. There is considerable phonetic variation in LE according to age, gender and socioeconomic class, although this is an area where modern research is lacking. In what follows, where the speaker produces some phonetic feature which is known to be atypical of LE or where a feature varies according to some sociolinguistic parameter, this will be pointed out