The Scouse accent: Dey talk like dat, don’t dey?

Aug 9 2008 by Peter Grant, Liverpool Daily Post

Researching his new book about the Scouse accent was a very personal journey for journalist Peter Grant. Here he recalls the experience

"ALRIGHT, la,” is a phrase I was brought up on which was instilled in me by my dad, a Liverpool docker.

I never knew what it meant as a child running up and down jiggers (alley ways) back then in Paul Street, Liverpool 3, but I have used it ever since.

Fifty years on, I say it without thinking about it – every single day.

Even girls I speak to get an “Alright, la”. Maybe I should try la-ess?

I am deffo (definitely) proud of the Scouse accent. It will be with me till the end when I reluctantly drop off me perch, so to speak.

Yet the penny didn’t drop on me all those years ago that we Scousers were indeed different. Growing up in tough Liverpool, everyone spoke the same.

But then we went on exotic school outing trips to places like Chester Zoo and North Wales, where we thought everyone else was talking “dead weird”.

Even posh teachers at my school, Cardinal Godfrey, in Anfield, spoke just like us . . . and they had had an “educashun”.

It was only when adulthood beckoned and we were given the baton in the grief-filled relay race of life that I started to hear things differently . . . literally.

But Scouse is also three things in one – a people, a nutritious dish and a unique language.

Studying English literature and public speaking at Ruskin College in Oxford, I was called “Scouser” by fellow students – in the same way my mum and dad were called by this affectionate name during World War II when they met Geordies, Brummies, Cockneys et al.

In the city of dreaming spires, one of my tutors couldn’t fathom out what I was saying on certain occasions.

He said I needed subtitles.

Boris Johnson, studying Classics at a posher college, even called me “a Scouse git”.

I just called him “Johnno, la”.

Later, working in London, proved to be another ear-opener. In an office, pub or on the Tube, hearing a Scouse accent was like an aural postcard from home.

You knew you were in good company. Knowworra mean, like.