Geordie English

Geordie () is a nickname for a person from the Tyneside area of North East England, and the dialect used by its inhabitants, also known in linguistics as Tyneside English or Newcastle English. There are different definitions of what constitutes a Geordie. The term is used and has been historically used to refer to the people of the North East. A Geordie can also specifically be a native of Tyneside (especially Newcastle upon Tyne) and the surrounding areas. Not everyone from the North East of England identifies as a Geordie.

Geordie is a continuation and development of the language spoken by Anglo-Saxon settlers, initially employed by the ancient Brythons to fight the Pictish invaders after the end of Roman rule in Britain in the 5th century. The Angles, Saxons and Jutes who arrived became ascendant politically and culturally over the native British through subsequent migration from tribal homelands along the North Sea coast of mainland Europe. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms that emerged in the Dark Ages spoke largely mutually intelligible varieties of what is now called Old English, each varying somewhat in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. This linguistic conservatism means that poems by the Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede translate more successfully into Geordie than into Standard English.

In Northern England and the Scottish borders, then dominated by the kingdom of Northumbria, there developed a distinct Northumbrian Old English dialect. Later Irish migrants possibly influenced Geordie phonology from the early 19th century onwards.

The British Library points out that the Norse, who primarily lived south of the River Tees, affected the language in Yorkshire but not in regions to the north. This source adds that "the border skirmishes that broke out sporadically during the Middle Ages meant the River Tweed established itself as a significant northern barrier against Scottish influence". Today, many who speak the Geordie dialect use words such as gan ('go' – modern German ) and bairn ('child' – modern Danish ) which "can still trace their roots right back to the Angles".

The word "Geordie" can refer to a supporter of Newcastle United. The Geordie Schooner glass was traditionally used to serve Newcastle Brown Ale.

The Geordie dialect and identity are primarily associated with those of a working-class background. A 2008 newspaper survey found the Geordie accent the "most attractive in England".

Geographical coverage

People

When referring to the people, as opposed to the dialect, dictionary definitions of a Geordie typically refer to a native or inhabitant of Newcastle upon Tyne, England, or its environs, an area that encompasses North Tyneside, Newcastle, South Tyneside and Gateshead. This area has a combined population of around 700,000, based on 2011 census-data.

The term itself, according to Brockett, originated from all the North East coal mines. The catchment area for the term "Geordie" can include Northumberland and County Durham or be confined to an area as small as the city of Newcastle upon Tyne and the metropolitan boroughs of Tyneside.

Scott Dobson, the author of the book ''Larn Yersel Geordie'', once stated that his grandmother, who was brought up in Byker, thought the miners were the true Geordies. There is a theory the name comes from the Northumberland and Durham coal mines. Poems and songs written in this area in 1876 (according to the OED), speak of the "Geordie".

Dialect

Academics refer to the Geordie dialect as "Tyneside English".

According to the British Library, "Locals insist there are significant differences between Geordie and several other local dialects, such as Pitmatic and Mackem. Pitmatic is the dialect of the former mining areas in County Durham and around Ashington to the north of Newcastle upon Tyne, while Mackem is used locally to refer to the dialect of the city of Sunderland and the surrounding urban area of Wearside".

Etymology

A number of rival theories explain how the term "Geordie" came about, though all accept that it derives from a familiar diminutive form of the name George, "a very common name among the pitmen" (coal miners) in North East England; indeed, it was once the most popular name for eldest sons in the region.

One account traces the name to the times of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715. The Jacobites declared that the natives of Newcastle were staunch supporters of the Hanoverian kings, whose first representative George I reigned (1714–1727) at the time of the 1715 rebellion. Newcastle contrasted with rural Northumberland, which largely supported the Jacobite cause. In this case, the term "Geordie" may have derived from the popular anti-Hanoverian song " Cam Ye O'er Frae France?", which calls the first Hanoverian king "Geordie Whelps", a play on "George the Guelph".

Another explanation for the name states that local miners in the northeast of England used Geordie safety lamps, designed by George Stephenson, known locally as "Geordie the engine-wright", in 1815 rather than the competing Davy lamps, designed about the same time by Humphry Davy and used in other mining communities. Using the chronological order of two John Trotter Brockett books, ''Geordie'' was given to North East pitmen; later he acknowledges that the pitmen also christened their Stephenson lamp ''Geordie''.

Linguist Katie Wales also dates the term earlier than does the current ''Oxford English Dictionary''; she observes that ''Geordy'' (or ''Geordie'') was a common name given to coal-mine pitmen in ballads and songs of the region, noting that such usage turns up as early as 1793. It occurs in the titles of two songs by songwriter Joe Wilson: "Geordy, Haud the Bairn" and "Keep your Feet Still, Geordie". Citing such examples as the song "Geordy Black", written by Rowland Harrison of Gateshead, she contends that, as a consequence of popular culture, the miner and the keelman had become icons of the region in the 19th century, and "Geordie" was a label that "affectionately and proudly reflected this," replacing the earlier ballad emblem, the figure of Bob Crankie.

In the ''English Dialect Dictionary'' of 1900, Joseph Wright gave as his fourth definition of "Geordie": ''A man from Tyneside; a miner; a north-country collier vessel'', quoting two sources from Northumberland, one from East Durham and one from Australia. The source from Durham stated: "In South Tyneside even, this name was applied to the Lower Tyneside men."

Newcastle publisher Frank Graham's ''Geordie Dictionary'' states:

In Graham's many years of research, the earliest record he found of the term's use dated to 1823 by local comedian Billy Purvis. Purvis had set up a booth at the Newcastle Races on the Town Moor. In an angry tirade against a rival showman, who had hired a young pitman called Tom Johnson to dress as a clown, Billy cried out to the clown:

(Rough translation: "Oh man, who but a fool would have sold off his furniture and left his wife? Now, you're a fair downright fool, not an artificial fool like Billy Purvis! You're a real Geordie! Go on, man, and hide yourself! Go on and get your picks xesagain. You may do for the city, but never for the west end of our town!")

John Camden Hotten wrote in 1869: "Geordie, general term in Northumberland and Durham for a pitman, or coal-miner. Origin not known; the term has been in use more than a century." Using Hotten as a chronological reference, Geordie has been documented for at least years as a term related to Northumberland and County Durham.

The name ''Bad-weather Geordy'' applied to cockle sellers:

Travel writer Scott Dobson used the term "Geordieland" in a 1973 guidebook to refer collectively to Northumberland and Durham.

Linguistic surveys

The Survey of English Dialects included Earsdon and Heddon-on-the-Wall in its fieldwork, administering more than 1000 questions to local informants.

The Linguistic Survey of Scotland included Cumberland and Northumberland (using pre-1974 boundaries) in its scope, collecting words through postal questionnaires. Tyneside sites included Cullercoats, Earsdon, Forest Hall, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, Wallsend-on-Tyne and Whitley Bay.

Phonology

The phonemic notation used in this article is based on the set of symbols used by . Other scholars may use different transcriptions. Watt and Allen stated that there were approximately 800,000 people in the early 2000s who spoke this form of British English.

Tyneside English (TE) is spoken in Newcastle upon Tyne, a city of around 260,000 inhabitants in the far north of England, and in the conurbation stretching east and south of Newcastle along the valley of the River Tyne as far as the North Sea. The total population of this conurbation, which also subsumes Gateshead, Jarrow, North and South Shields, Whitley Bay, and Tynemouth, exceeds 800,000.

Consonants

Geordie consonants generally follow those of Received Pronunciation, with these unique characteristics as follows:

* appearing in an unstressed final syllable of a word (such as in ''reading'') is pronounced as (thus, ''reading'' is ).
* The Geordie accent does not use the glottal stop in a usual fashion. It is characterised by a unique type of glottal stops. can all be pronounced simultaneously with a glottal stop after them in Geordie, both at the end of a syllable and sometimes before a weak vowel.
** T-glottalisation, in which is realised by before a syllabic nasal (e.g., ''button'' as ), in absolute final position (''get'' as ), and whenever the is intervocalic so long as the latter vowel is not stressed (''pity'' as ).
** Glottaling in Geordie is known as 'pre-glottalisation', which is 'an occlusion at the appropriate place of articulation and 'glottalisation', usually manifested as a short period of laryngealised voice before and/or after and often also during the stop gap'. This type of glottal is unique to Tyneside English.
* Other voiceless stops, , are glottally reinforced in medial position, and preaspirated in final position.
* The dialect is non-rhotic, like most British dialects, most commonly as an alveolar approximant , although a labiodental realisation is also growing for younger females (this is also possible by older males, albeit rarer). Traditionally, intrusive R was not present, instead glottalising between boundaries, however is present in newer varieties.
* ''Yod''-coalescence in both stressed and unstressed syllables (so that ''dew'' becomes ).
* is traditionally clear in all contexts, meaning the velarised allophone is absent. However, modern accents may periodically use in syllable final positions, sometimes it may even be vocalised (as in ''bottle'' ).

Vowels

; Length
* For some speakers, vowel length alternates with vowel quality in a very similar way to the Scottish vowel length rule.
* Vowel length is phonemic for many speakers of Geordie, meaning that length is often the one and only phonetic difference between and ( and ) or between and ( and ). If older or traditional dialect forms are considered, () also has a phonemic long counterpart , which is mostly used in words spelled with , making minimal pairs such as ''tack'' vs. ''talk'' (less broad Geordie pronunciation: ). Another appears as an allophone of before final voiced consonants in words such as ''lad'' .

; Phonetic quality and phonemic incidence
* and , , are typically somewhat closer than in other varieties in morphologically closed syllables; is also less prone to fronting than in other varieties of BrE and its quality is rather close to the cardinal . However, younger women tend to use a central instead. In morphologically open syllables, and are realised as closing diphthongs . This creates minimal pairs such as ''freeze'' vs. ''frees'' and ''bruise'' (hereafter transcribed with for the sake of simplicity) vs. ''brews'' .
** The vowel is tense and is best analysed as belonging to the phoneme.
* As other Northern English varieties, Geordie lacks the - split, so that words like ''cut'', ''up'' and ''luck'' have the same phoneme as ''put'', ''sugar'' and ''butcher''. The typical phonetic realisation is unrounded , but it may be hypercorrected to among middle-class (especially female) speakers.
* The long close-mid vowels , in and , may be realised as monophthongs in open syllables or as opening diphthongs in closed syllables. Alternatively, can be a closing diphthong and can be centralised to . The opening diphthongs are recessive, as younger speakers reject them in favour of the monophthongal .
** Other, now archaic, realisations of include in ''snow'' and in ''soldiers'' .
** Many female speakers merge with , but the exact phonetic quality of the merged vowel is uncertain.
* , , may be phonetically or a higher, unrounded vowel . An RP-like vowel is also possible.
** In older broadest Geordie, merges with to under the influence of a uvular that once followed it (when Geordie was still a rhotic dialect). The fact that the original vowel is never hypercorrected to or suggests that either this merger was never categorical, or that speakers are unusually successful in sorting those vowels out again.
* The schwa is often rather open (). It also tends to be longer in duration than the preceding stressed vowel, even if that vowel is phonologically long. Therefore, words such as ''water'' and ''meter'' are pronounced and . This feature is shared with the very conservative (''Upper Crust'') variety of Received Pronunciation.
** Words such as ''voices'' and ''ended'' have in the second syllable (so ), rather than the of RP. That does not mean that Geordie has undergone the weak vowel merger because can still be found in some unstressed syllables in place of the more usual . An example of that is the second syllable of ''seven'' , but it can also be pronounced with a simple schwa instead. Certain weak forms also have instead of ; these include ''at'' (homophonous with strong ''it''), ''of'' (nearly homophonous with ''if''), ''as'' (homophonous with strong ''is''), ''can'' and ''us'' (again, homophonous with strong ''is'').
* As in other Northern English dialects, the vowel is short in Geordie, thus there is no London-style trap-bath split. There are a small number of exceptions to this rule; for instance, ''half'', ''master'', ''plaster'' and sometimes also ''disaster'' are pronounced with the vowel .
* Some speakers unround , , to . Regardless of the rounding, the difference in backness between and is very pronounced, a feature which Geordie shares with RP and some northern and midland cities such as Stoke-on-Trent and Derby, but not with the accents of the middle north.
* Older traditional Geordie does not always adhere to the same distributional patters of vowels found in standard varieties of English. Examples of that include the words ''no'' and ''stone'', which may be pronounced and , so with vowels that are best analysed as belonging to the and phonemes.

; Diphthongs
* The second elements of and , , are commonly as open as the typical Geordie realisation of ().
* The first element of , , varies between , and . Traditionally, this whole vowel was a high monophthong (with ''town'' being pronounced close to RP ''toon'') and this pronunciation can still be heard, as can a narrower diphthong (with ''town'' being pronounced close to RP ''tone'').
* is , but Geordie speakers generally use a less common allophone for certain environments in accordance with the Scottish vowel length rule, , which has a longer, lower, and more back onset than the main allophone. Thus is used in words such as ''knife'' , whereas is used in ''knives'' . For simplicity, both of them are written with in this article.

Vocabulary

The Geordie dialect shares similarities with other Northern English dialects, as well as with the Scots language (See Rowe 2007, 2009).

Dorfy, real name Dorothy Samuelson-Sandvid, was a noted Geordie dialect writer. In her column for the South Shields Gazette, Samuelson-Sandvid attests many samples of Geordie language usage, such as the nouns ''bairn'' ("child") and ''clarts'' ("mud"); the adjectives ''canny'' ("pleasant") and ''clag'' ("sticky"); and the imperative verb phrase ''howay'' ("hurry up!"; "come on!")

'' Howay'' is broadly comparable to the invocation "Come on!" or the French "Allez-y!" ("Go on!"). Examples of common use include ''Howay man!'', meaning "come on" or "hurry up", ''Howay the lads!'' as a term of encouragement for a sports team for example (the players' tunnel at St James' Park has this phrase just above the entrance to the pitch), or ''Ho'way!?'' (with stress on the second syllable) expressing incredulity or disbelief. The literal opposite of this phrase is ''haddaway'' ("go away"); although not as common as ''howay'', it is perhaps most commonly used in the phrase "Haddaway an' shite" (Tom Hadaway, Figure 5.2 Haddaway an' shite; 'Cursing like sleet blackening the buds, raging at the monk of Jarrow scribbling his morality and judgement into a book.').

Another word, ''divvie'' or ''divvy'' ("idiot"), seems to come from the Co-op dividend, or from the two Davy lamps (the more explosive Scotch Davy used in 1850, commission disapproved of its use in 1886 (inventor not known, nicknamed Scotch Davy probably given by miners after the Davy lamp was made perhaps by north east miners who used the Stephenson Lamp), and the later better designed Davy designed by Humphry Davy also called the Divvy.) As in a north east miner saying 'Marra, ye keep way from me if ye usin a divvy.' It seems the word divvie then translated to daft lad/lass. Perhaps coming from the fact one would be seen as foolish going down a mine with a Scotch Divvy when there are safer lamps available, like the Geordie, or the Davy.

The Geordie word '' netty'', meaning a toilet and place of need and necessity for relief or bathroom, has an uncertain origin, though some have theorised that it may come from slang used by Roman soldiers on Hadrian's Wall, which may have later become '' gabinetti'' in the Romance language Italian (such as in the Westoe Netty, the subject of a famous painting from Bob Olley). However, ''gabbinetto'' is the Modern Italian diminutive of ''gabbia'', which actually derives from the Latin ''cavea'' ("hollow", "cavity", "enclosure"), the root of the loanwords that became the Modern English ''cave'', ''cage'', and ''gaol''. Thus, another explanation would be that it comes from a Modern Italian form of the word '' gabinetti'', though only a relatively small number of Italians have migrated to the North of England, mostly during the 19th century.

Some etymologists connect the word '' netty'' to the Modern English word ''needy''. John Trotter Brockett, writing in 1829 in his ''A glossary of north country words...'', claims that the etymon of ''netty'' (and its related form ''neddy'') is the Modern English ''needy'' and ''need''.

Bill Griffiths, in ''A Dictionary of North East Dialect'', points to the earlier form, the Old English ''níd''; he writes: "MS locates a possible early ex. "Robert Hovyngham sall make... at the other end of his house a knyttyng" York 1419, in which case the root could be OE níd 'necessary'". Another related word, ''nessy'' is thought (by Griffiths) to derive from the Modern English "necessary".

A poem called "Yam" narrated by author Douglas Kew, demonstrates the usage of a number of Geordie words.

References

Sources

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External links

Newcastle English (Geordie)

Sounds Familiar?
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The Geordie Directory
– Find out about & learn the Geordie accent

Geordie dialect words
on Wikibooks
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Culture in Tyne and Wear
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English language in England
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