On the Geordie Dialect

I remember from my English classes in high school and college being taught that the English language was distinct in not having any dialects, merely different accents. Then, during my college years, it was announced that there had been discovered a brand new dialect along the coastal islands of Georgia and South Carolina amongst the black population living there. There was a big debate as to whether Gullah was merely a dialect or creole or a whole different language with roots in English and various African languages. I found all this extremely interesting at the time because all my teachers still insisted that English had only different accents and no dialects.

Then all these many years later, I moved to England to find out that not only does English have a great variety of honest to goodness dialects, but hundreds of local accents that vary depending on what village or which side of town the person comes from. My English teachers must have been thinking of American English . . . which, by the way, is considered over here to be a distinct dialect of English. I wonder what my high school English teachers would have thought of that.

The dialect that is used here where I live is called Geordie. Nobody is quite sure where the term Geordie comes from. There are as many theories as there are people offering these theories. Whatever the origin, the fact remains the Geordie dialect not only thrives, but is known of all over the UK, not always with a favorable reputation. :-) Folks from the southern portions of this fair country think of Geordies about the same way folks from Georgia think of people from Alabama. I think this is highly unfair because many great engineers who have contributed a great deal not only to England, but to all industrialized countries have come from the Newcastle area. You can find some of my musings on this subject in earlier posts.

The Geordie dialect happens to be one of the oldest dialects in the English language. The reasons for this are somewhat complex. One of the things we Americans fail to appreciate about our mother tongue is that it has a very rich and deep history whose development reflects quite accurately the history of England, especially of all the early invasions of this island. After the Roman Army was withdrawn from Britannia sometime around 400 A.D., there was left behind a mixture of Britons and Romans who continued to live together, intermixing through marriage much as they had been for the previous 300 years or so. But for reasons we are not quite sure of, various peoples from present day Denmark and the Flanders region, known as the Angles, Saxons and the Jutes, started to invade the Eastern coastal lands of England. Sometimes they were invited to help the original Britons fight off the Picts who originally occupied Scotland. Other times, they just came on their own will, conquering large portions of modern day England. Eventually, they had pushed the original Celtic Britons back into what is now Wales and Cornwall.

Later came the Vikings from the same area of Europe, trying to do to the Anglo-Saxons what they themselves did to the Britons. They weren't as successful as the Angles or the Saxons were, but they left an indelible mark upon the genetic pool and upon the languages of the Anglo-Saxons. It was this mixture of the various languages that became known to us as Old English. Believe it or not, but there are a great many words from that time period that still exists today, but are pronounced much different from their original pronunciation.

In 1066, when William the Conqueror landed in England and defeated Harold II at the battle of Hastings, and then subsequently went on to conquer the entire country, Norse-French was introduced to England. Norse-French was itself a melding of Viking and French. This became the language of the government while Old English continued in use with the common people. But they influenced each other to produce what is now known as Middle English.

It wasn't until the advent of the Movable Type Printing Press that Modern English began to emerge, slowly overtaking the wildly varying dialects of Middle English and it was during this time that Norse French at last disappeared as the language of the government. While Modern English of the time (that spoken by William Tyndale and Shakespeare) helped bring into use a common tongue that could be recognized and spoken all over England, there still remained the regional dialects. But they didn't differ too much from Modern English, mostly in that they retained a few of their original words or usages that didn't conform to Modern English.

Geordie, on the other hand, was little affected by Norse-French, and as such, didn't evolve so much towards Middle English as the other dialects did. Nor, it seems, has it been as affected by the Great Vowel Shift that has made such a difference on how we pronounce our words today as compared to the days of king Henry VIII. Much of what makes up the Geordie dialect today comes directly from the original Anglo-Saxon and borrowing a lot from the original Viking language. Mix in a little of the Scots and the rest as Modern English, but with the original pronunciations and you get the Geordie dialect. Indeed, to a visitor who has never heard it before, it sounds like a completely different language altogether! If it hadn't been for my exposure to the American English dialect common to the coastal areas of North Carolina where the pronunciation of many English words were frozen at the time of English settlement in the very early Colonial period of our history, I wouldn't have recognized any of the Geordie at all.

One thing that is common to what I learned from my family in North Carolina and here in the Newcastle area is the habit of pronouncing words that have either "ow" (such as down) or "ou" (such as found or around). In both places, these words are commonly spoken with an "oo" sound. So, in both places, you are just as liable to hear "It's aboot time to turn the car aroond and head back to the hoose."

Here is a short list of some Geordie terms I copied from Wikipedia:

"Geordie also has a large amount of vocabulary not heard elsewhere in England, though some are shared with (or similar to) Scots. The Geordie accent is often broader (heavily used) in Newcastle, other parts of the north east tend not to have a very strong accent, it all depends on how its grasped. Words still in common use by Geordie dialect speakers today include:

• areet (/'a:lri:t/ a variation on alright or Hello
• cannit 'can not'
• canny for "pleasant" (the Scottish use of canny is often somewhat less flattering), or to mean 'quite'. Someone could therefore be 'canny canny'.
• cuddy 'small horse or a pony'
• geet for "very", also *muckle (used more in Northumberland)
• hyem/hyam for "home"
• deeky for "look at" *very rarely used*
• kets for "sweets/treats"
• knaa for "to know/know"
• divint for "don't"/
• bairn/grandbairn for "child/grandchild"
• hacky for "dirty"
• ya for you/your
• gan for "to go/go"
• hoy for "to throw"^[24]
• pet a term of address or endearment towards a woman or a child
• toon for "Town"
• nettie for "toilet"
• naa for "no"
• aye for "yes"
• neb for "nose" (nebby=nosey)
• banter for "chat/gossip"
• clart for "mud" as in "there's clarts on yar boots"
• hadaway for "get away"
• hinny a term of endearment - "Honey"^[24]
• haad for "hold" example: 'keep a hadd' is 'keep a hold' and 'had yer gob' becomes 'keep quiet'. That polite little notice in the parks aboot keepin' yor dog on a lead is 'ye cud hev keep a-hadden yor dog'^[24]
• divvie for "stupid person"
• tab for "cigarette"
• chor "to steal" *very rarely used*
• chiv for "knife"
• neva never
• wor for "our", used mainly in the context of wor kid, meaning 'friend', one's sibling or literally 'our kid'. Used primarily to denote a family member.
• nowt for "nothing"^[24]
• is for "me", but you can't say "that is my ball > that is is ball".
• me for my, and also works in myself > meself or mesel.
• man Not realy got a translation, often used eg. "Give is it here now man"
• wuh for "us"
• a for I
• ee used like oh, often in shock "ee neva"
• doon down, own is often replaced with oon.
• get awesh for "go away" *very rarely used*
• wint for wont
• doon for down
• D/dee for do
• chud/chutty chewing gum
• Neva for never
• N'ew Now, very hard to write. Prounounded like new, N 'ew
• Lend often used for borrow, "lend is a pen" meaning "Can I borrow a pen".
• Wo, Wa, Woh or wat or wot what"

My eleven year old Step-daughter, who has spent most of her life here in the Newcastle area, dispite her mother's influence, is becoming quite fluent in Geordie and has acted as a guide for me in my exploration of this dialect. The most common usage she has adopted is referring to herself as "us" as in, "Are ya gan follow us?" meaning "Are you going to follow me." The only time I have a hard time following what is being said by the locals now is when they speak extremely fast (which means most of them) or too softly to be heard. So the lesson I have learned is to keep my step-daughter close at hand as an interpreter when possible. Too bad she doesn't feel the same way. LOL

The difference between Gasoline and Petrol

One of the word changes that I keep tripping up on is the Gasoline/Petrol words. They both mean exactly the same thing, but one is American and the other is British - I'll leave it up to you to figure out who uses which word. The only significant difference is the price! Gasoline costs a great deal less than Petrol. By this, I mean that fuel costs here in the United Kingdom are significantly higher than in America.

Back in October when I was home in Georgia visiting my family and friends, gas prices were artificially inflated up to as much as $5 a gallon or more due to the two hurricanes hitting the Texas coasts this year, almost back to back. Now I understand it's down close to $2 a gallon again. That's about what it was when I moved over here to England 2 years ago. At that same time, the price of petrol was about 87 pence or so a Liter. Yes, they sell fuel over here in liters, or to be more proper, litres instead of gallons. At that time, the currency exchange was hovering around $2 per Pound Stirling. So by factoring in 3.78 liters per gallon multiplied by the price per liter gives us a price of 3.29 Pounds per gallon. Then you multiply this by the currency exchange rate at the time of $2 for £1, that gives us a dollar value for $6.58 a gallon for gas here in England. Oh, and by the way, I learned that I had to be careful about which gallon I use in these calculations. We Americans use the English gallon while the British use the Imperial gallon, which is a wee bit more. Why they don't use their own gallon as we do is a mystery to me.

But the price of oil went up to record highs during this last year and the price of petrol ran up to about a £1.17 a liter. Now plugging this into the above calculations, we find that gas prices here in American dollars was as high as $8.85 per gallon. The prices were even higher before I left to come to America in September. Then, in this last month, the price of oil has dropped a lot and because of the world wide economic crisis, the Pound Sterling has dropped against the US Dollar. As I write this, £1 will fetch you only $1.47.

As I was riding on the bus yesterday (because we sold our car because it was too expensive to keep), I noticed that the price at a local station was now down to £0.92 per liter. Now let's plug in these new figures into the formula I describe above. We get a gallon of gas for about £3.48. Enter in the new exchange rates and we get $5.11 a gallon. This is still more than double the price of gas back home in Georgia. But it's not as bad as it was just a few months ago. Now consider then that the price of oil per barrel is the same for the British as it is for the Americans, maybe even a little less because of the large oil deposits in the North Sea that mostly comes through British companies. The large difference for what we pay for gasoline/petrol here in England compared to what you are paying for it now is due largely to taxes! So next time you start to grumble about the price of gas, consider this: it could be much worse!

The same goes for taxes. Taxes here in the United Kingdom are much higher across the board than they are back in the good old USA. They have a national sales tax, called Value Added Tax or VAT for short, of 17 percent! Ouch! And Income Taxes can be rather painful too, especially if you are rich. The highest tax bracket as I understand it, is about 77 percent! Can you imagine having to pay 77 percent of your income in for taxes? What's the point of becoming rich if most of it goes to the State? And to think that I used to grumble when the company I used to work for back in the States would take out the maximum taxes out of my annual bonus at the rate of 28%. But the nice thing over here is that the Crown doesn't tax people for income earned abroad. The IRS will tax you for everything you earn, no matter what country you earn it in. British citizens living abroad don't have to pay taxes to the Crown for any earnings they get from abroad. So far as I know, the United States is the only country that charges income tax on citizens that live abroad. However, they have given us expatriates a wee bit of wiggle room. We don't have to pay on any income as long as we earn less than $76,000 a year. Once you hit that mark, you gotta pay taxes on all of it. Not that I have to worry about such things as that because I'll never earn that much in a year even if I live in the States. :-) I still have to file; I just don't have to pay . . . yet.

Guy Falkes Night: just what are they celebrating?

The name Guy Falkes will remind the history buffs reading this blog of the Gun Powder Plot of 1605. For the rest of us, a brief summary may be necessary. Back in the 1500's, England underwent the English Reformation when King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic Church and established the Church of England so that he could get a divorce from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon (somewhere in Spain). The Reformation in England was not easy and often quite rocky. Politics as much as religious convictions were behind much of what happened during those turbulent years. After Henry died, his young son, Edward VI didn't last too long either. Mary, Henry's oldest daughter came to the throne. Her mother, Catherine, had firmly rooted Mary in the Roman Catholic faith and because of this, Mary set to reverse the actions of her father and root out all the Protestant leaders, earning her the name of Bloody Mary. She had over 300 Protestant leaders and followers burned at the stake during her short reign.

Elizabeth I, daughter of Henry and Anne Boylyn, took to the throne next and reaffirmed her father's actions and brought England back to a Protestant state of affairs. Over the next 50 years, the Roman Catholics of England had to watch their step, often conducting their affairs in private in order to not be exposed as traitors to the Crown. James I was a staunch Protestant and was less tolerant of Roman Catholics than Elizabeth (if you can call her tolerant). James had been on the throne only a few years when some of the Roman Catholic community, seeing that no help was going to come from King Philip of Spain, decided to take matters into their own hands. Their plan was to blow up the Palace of Parlament during the opening ceremonies when the king and all of Parlament would be present.

The Gun Powder Plot, as it became known, involved renting a cellar under the Parlamentary buildings and placing 800 pounds of gun powder there to blow up the entire building thereby killing everyone inside. However, at the last minute, literally, on November 5th, Guy Falkes was caught trying to light the fuse before fleeing. Under torture, he later revealed the names of his co-conspirators, all of whom were already known. He died a traitor's death along with several of his cohorts at the Tower of London soon thereafter.

Now here is where things get a little strange for us Americans to understand. By Royal Decree and by law, everyone was required to celebrate the deliverance of the king. This compulsory celebration lasted until 1859. However, to this day, most all of England celebrates Guy Fawkes night on November 5th of every year. In most communities, children would make little effigies of Guy Fawkes and stand on the street corner begging a penny for the Guy. They would then take the money and buy fireworks to shoot off at the bon fire later that night. This custom of the children has fallen by the wayside in most parts of England now, but the Bon Fire and the fireworks are still a big part of the night.

When I first experienced this last year, I asked several many of my friends here in England just what the celebration was about. Were they celebrating the fact that Guy Falkes failed in his plot or that he made the effort? I got answers on both sides of that fence, but the best answer I think I received was from a woman in my church when she said that generally, everyone just got together and celebrated anarchy for a night.

So, this November 5th, weather permitting, I may be there at the Bon Fire celebrating the results of the election of America's next president or I may be looking forward to the anarchy that may descend upon my homeland in the next few years.