Where does that classic ‘blocked-nose Scouse’ way of speaking come from?
The period when you are at your most intensively interactive and when you most want to be different from everybody else is when you are an adolescent. Let’s say starting from nine or ten years old through to 17 or 18; it’s very important for young people to establish their own identities. One of the ways they’ll do that is by rebelling in all sorts of ways – particularly against their parents. They will speak in a different way to their parents, with their own slang. That’s the time of life when people are typically at their least standardised. Once you reach more than 17 or 18 you’re thinking about settling down and getting a job and sorting out a relationship. As you become part of the whole institutional machinery your voice tends to move with you and you become more kind of ‘main stream’. You will still have your Belfast or Glaswegian or Merseyside accent, but it’ll be less extreme. People’s accents do change quite a lot in early adulthood. People’s accents change all throughout th
