The Language of Liverpool: Leaving home and coming back

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Nominated as a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year, Tony Crowley’s Liverpool: A Memoir of Words (2023) is a work of creative non-fiction that combines the study of language in Liverpool with social history, the history of the English language, and personal memoir.

A beautifully written book — based on a lifetime’s academic research — it explores the relationship between language and memory and demonstrates the ways in which words are enmeshed in history (and history in words). Starting with ‘ace’ and weaving its way alphabetically to ‘Z-Cars’, the work illustrates the deep relationship that has been forged in the past two-hundred-years or so between a form of language, a place and a social identity.

In this talk, Tony — born and raised in working-class Liverpool in the 1960s and 70s — will discuss Liverpool: A Memoir Of Words in relation to the (im)possibility of leaving Liverpool and the joy of linguistic homecoming. He’ll consider topics such as the story of the Irish roots of Liverpool English, the multicultural complexity of the form, our common use of ‘plazzymorphs’ and the ways that Liverpudlian words exemplify standard processes of linguistic development.

‘A gold mine of a book’, Frank Cottrell-Boyce.

Host or Publisher Liverpool Irish Festival