Geordie


Geordie is a demonym and vernacular dialect characterising Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the wider Tyneside area of North East England.
The vernacular, also known as Tyneside English or Newcastle English in linguistics, is one of the major dialects of northern England. It developed as a variety of the old Northumbrian dialect.
As a regional nickname, applying the term is set by one's definition of or acceptance to being called a Geordie: it varies from supporters of Newcastle United Football Club, the city, Tyneside, Tyne-and-Wear and to North East England. People from the latter two wider areas are less likely to accept the term as applying to them.
The term has also been applied to the Geordie Schooner, glass traditionally used to serve Newcastle Brown Ale. It is often considered unintelligible to many other native English speakers. The Geordie dialect and identity are perceived as the "most attractive in England", according to a 2008 newspaper survey, amongst the British public and as working-class.

History

Like all English dialects, the Geordie dialect traces back to the Old English spoken by Anglo-Saxon settlers, initially employed by the ancient Brythons who fought 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. In Northern England and the Scottish borders, then dominated by the kingdom of Northumbria, there developed a distinct Northumbrian Old English dialect, which preceded modern Geordie. The linguistic conservatism of Geordie means that poems by the Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede can be translated more successfully into Geordie than into standard modern English.
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 and bairn, which "can still trace their roots right back to the Angles".

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, 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" 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 is 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 1,000 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. Watt and Allen stated that there were approximately 800,000 people in the early 2000s who spoke this form of British English.
Tyneside English 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 is pronounced as .
  • 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, in absolute final position, and whenever the is intervocalic so long as the latter vowel is not stressed.
  • * 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 other dialects of England, with being realised most commonly as an alveolar approximant, although a labiodental realisation is additionally growing in prevalence among younger females. Traditionally, intrusive R was not present in Geordie, with speakers instead glottalising between boundaries; however, it is present in newer varieties of the dialect.
  • 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.