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 After the Roman Army was withdrawn from Britannia sometime around 400 A.D., there was left behind a mixture of Britons and Romans who continued to live together, intermixing through marriage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