The history and future of the Liverpool accent aka Scouse is discussed in two different articles linked to research being carried out by linguist Andrew Hamer. The BBC news website looks at the background to the accent, while today's Telegraph looks in more detail at its spread.
The Telegraph also features a leader article (editorial) which stops just short of patting the scousers on the head, rubbing their little chins and calling them "plucky little northern types", but does describe theirs as a "cute" accent. It's worth a read if you're thinking about the kinds of attitudes that are around to regional varieties of English, while the news story is a good read if you're looking at dialect levelling and accent change.
And don't forget that BBC Voices and the British Library Sounds Familiar sites have excellent material - including audio files - on all sorts of varieties of English.
Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Variation & Change
ENGA3 (new spec) - Language Explorations
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