The Beatles’ accents: insights on audiovisual characterisations of Scouse

One of the most popular varieties of British English, at least since the 1960s, the Liverpool accent is the focus of this chapter which also concerns itself with the linguistic and cultural polarity between the accents of the North and the South of England, as portrayed in innumerable fictional representations. Characterised by phonological and prosodic peculiarities which make it stand out from the Lancashire linguistic context to which it belongs, the Liverpool accent is famously associated, in people’s imagination, to the group of The Beatles. Thanks to The Beatles’ popularity, the Liverpool accent and dialect became familiar among the young people in the United Kingdom and beyond, becoming emblematic of the 1960s and contributing to a shift in the pattern of cultural domination, thanks to which British pop acquired an autonomous linguistic value. Dialogue excerpts of real and fictional Liverpudlians on screen will be illustrated, as well as the problems involved in their translation, highlighting how this accent is generally contrasted in source texts to other varieties of British English in sociolinguistically relevant ways.