Geordie
Geordie is a nickname for a person from the Tyneside area of North East England, and the dialect used by its inhabitants. 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 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 influenced Geordie phonology from the early 19th century onwards.
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
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 Blyth, Ashington, 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, speak of the "Geordie."
Academics refer to the Geordie dialect as "Tyneside English".
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" 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 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 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:
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 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.Consonants
Geordie consonants generally follow those of Received Pronunciation, with these unique characteristics as follows:- appearing in an unstressed final syllable of a word is pronounced as .
- Geordie is characterised by a unique type of glottal stops. can all be glottalised 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, in absolute final position, and whenever the is intervocalic so long as the latter vowel is not stressed.
- * Glottaling in Geordie is often perceived as a full glottal stop but it is in fact more often realised 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. Traditionally, intrusive R was not present, instead glottalising between boundaries, however is present in newer varieties.
- Yod-coalescence in both stressed and unstressed syllables.
- 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.
Vowels
- 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 and there is often no other phonetic difference between and on one hand and and on the other. If traditional dialect forms are considered, also has a phonemic long counterpart, but they contrast only before voiceless consonants. There are minimal pairs such as tack vs. talk . If they are disregarded, this is best regarded as a phonetic realisation of in certain words. It occurs only in broad Geordie. Another appears as an allophone of before final voiced consonants in words such as lad.
- are typically somewhat closer than in other varieties; 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.
- are monophthongs only in morphologically closed syllables. In morphologically open syllables, they are realised as closing diphthongs. This creates minimal pairs such as freeze vs. frees and bruise 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 speakers.
- The long close-mid vowels may be realised as monophthongs or as opening diphthongs. 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.
- Geordie does not always adhere to the same distributional patters of vowels found in Received Pronunciation or even the neighbouring accents. 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.
- 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 broad Geordie, merges with to under the influence of a uvular that once followed it. 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 variety of Received Pronunciation.
- Words such as voices and ended have in the second syllable, 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, of, as, can and us.
- As in other Northern English dialects, the vowel is short in Geordie. There are very few exceptions to this rule; for instance, master, plaster and sometimes also disaster are pronounced with.
- 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.
- The second elements of are commonly as open as the typical Geordie realisation of .
- The first element of varies between, and. Traditionally, this vowel was a monophthong and this pronunciation can still be heard, as can a narrower diphthong .
- is phonetically, but the Scottish vowel length rule applied by some speakers of Geordie creates an additional allophone that has a shorter, higher and more front onset than the main allophone. is used in words such as knife, whereas is used in e.g. knives. For simplicity, both of them are written with in this article.
Vocabulary
In her column for the South Shields Gazette, Dorothy Samuelson-Sandvid attests many samples of Geordie language usage, such as the nouns bairn and clarts ; the adjectives canny and clag ; and the imperative verb phrase howay
' is broadly comparable to the invocation "Come on!" or the French "Allez-y!". 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, or Ho'way!? expressing incredulity or disbelief. The literal opposite of this phrase is haddaway ; although not as common as howay, it is perhaps most commonly used in the phrase "Haddaway an' shite".
Another word, divvie or divvy, seems to come from the Co-op dividend, or from the two Davy lamps 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 ', 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 ' in the Romanic Italian language. However, gabbinetto is the Modern Italian diminutive of gabbia, which actually derives from the Latin ', 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 Romanic Italian form of the word ', 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 ' 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 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 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.
In popular culture
British Television presenters Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly are both from Newcastle upon Tyne.Stand-up comedian Sarah Millican was born and brought up in South Shields, England.
The musicians Brian Johnson, Sting, Bryan Ferry, Sam Fender,
Jimmy Nail, Mark Knopfler, Ginger Wildheart and Cheryl are Geordies.
Brendan Foster, Steve Cram and Sid Waddell have all worked as television sports commentators.
Little Mix members Jade Thirlwall and Perrie Edwards, X Factor winner Joe McElderry, best-selling author Catherine Cookson, Hollywood director Ridley Scott and actor/comedian Eric Idle were all born in South Shields.
Dorfy, real name Dorothy Samuelson-Sandvid, was a noted Geordie dialect writer who once wrote for the South Shields Gazette.
In the BBC Radio drama series The Archers, the character Ruth Archer is played as a Geordie.
The MTV reality show Geordie Shore, first broadcast in 2011, is based in Newcastle upon Tyne.
In Mark Knopfler's song "Sailing to Philadelphia", Jeremiah Dixon is described as a "Geordie boy".