title: Perceptual boundaries and complex identities: an investigation of attitudes towards “Scouse” by speakers on the Wirral
Creators: name: Byrne, Rachel
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2023

description: Liverpool English, or “Scouse”, is the dialect most often associated with Liverpool, England, and the surrounding areas of Merseyside (Trudgill, 1999). This research focuses on perceptions of local dialect, including “Scouse”, according to speakers on the Wirral peninsula, an area which is peripheral to Liverpool, but geographically separated via the River Mersey. Scouse dialect is associated with being an urban, working-class, variety of English (Boland, 2008), and linguistic studies have often focused mainly on the region of Liverpool, rather than peripheral areas of Merseyside. Research has rarely focused primarily on Wirral (with the exceptions of Newbrook (1986), Cooper and Lampropoulou (2021) and Lampropoulou and Cooper (2021), despite the fact that research has hypothesised that the Scouse dialect area will spread outwards from Liverpool, particularly into the Wirral (Newbrook, 1986; Trudgill, 1999). Moreover, no sociolinguistic research has yet been undertaken on the Wirral which both focuses primarily on speakers who are from middle-class areas , and which also takes a third-wave approach to perceptions of local dialect and identity (Eckert, 2012). 
 To collect data for this research, I used a mixed methodology involving draw-a-map tasks and semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with 41 informants, in order to investigate how Wirral speakers perceive local dialect boundaries in Merseyside. Using these methods, I examine how these perceptions impact upon speakers’ reported linguistic behaviour, particularly how Scouse is used as part of Wirral speakers’ stylistic repertoires to enable them to (re)construct their local identities. 
My data shows that for Wirral speakers, Scouse constitutes a stylistic resource which they used to index varying social values. For them, Scouse indexes being working-class, friendly, and informal, depending on the context, and Scouse is viewed as operating on a continuum in Merseyside, where some speakers are perceived to sound “more” or “less” Scouse than others. Unlike Liverpudlians, Wirral speakers do not view Scouse as inherent to their identities. Instead, they perceive Scouse as a dialectal feature which can be emphasized or drawn away from, depending on the identity that they are trying to index in a particular interaction. My data also shows that the ways in which speakers from middle-class areas of Wirral group themselves in relation to other local speakers (both within the Wirral, and in Merseyside more broadly), also varies. By analysing the perceptual boundaries drawn within Merseyside by Wirral speakers, and combining it with their commentaries about different areas and speakers, my data analysis contributes to an understanding of the complex (re)grouping process which Wirral speakers engage in. Overall, this study demonstrates the fluidity and multiplexity of Scouse, and explains the varied ways in which Wirral speakers engage with it, which is an under researched area of the sociolinguistics of the Scouse variety. 
The implication of this research is that it identifies and explains the different ways in which adult Wirral speakers view the linguistic and social landscape of Merseyside, and demonstrates why there is such a complex sense of identity for them.
This project contributes to research in the sociolinguistic field of variation and identity, particularly in relation to regional dialects and peripheral communities.