It was my dad’s birthday party yesterday and so we had practically the entire family gathered at my parent’s house. Most of them of course are from the local area and have had to make epic journeys of half a dozen miles at most to get here. Some others though are from northern England but no longer live in the area, they escaped long ago; they ended up in the south.
It started quickly. One of my uncles was joking on about some rubbish or other, it was all really pretty funny as he is one of those people who are naturally ‘happily drunk’. He had some rather funny stories to tell about when he and my dad were younger and their various escapades. To take a random sample of his speech: ‘Sa dhen ee kumz in cuvad in clarts en sha sez te im lyk, divint ye bee deein dhat on me kleen flaa lyk!’ (So then he comes in covered in mud and she says to him (!), don’t you be doing that on my clean floor!).
To everyone in the room of course this was perfectly compressible. It’s just the way normal people speak. It breaks every rule in the book for the English you’re taught in school but that’s not what it is, its Geordie.
We were all happily laughing away until enter one of my aunts. One from the south…She was aghast. She literally slapped him around the head and said ‘Talk properly man!’
‘Whey aa am taakin propa lyk’ (But I am talking properly!)
My sister, the London lover then weighs in on my aunts side “No you’re not! Don’t speak Geordie! That’s what charvas speak!”
This conversation reappeared later in the night. My southern aunt (the same one again) said “Oh I hate the way the kids these days speak so lazy. They knock off the ends of words and that sort of thing. They say bettA not better. Its properrr, not propA. A. Sheesh”
I was rather annoyed at this point “It is proppa!”
“No its not. Its proper. Properrrr”
“No. Its proppa.”
“Properrrrrr. RRRRR”
“PropPA”
Then another uncle joined in “You’re not back home now, its proppa up here!”
My aunt again though: “That’s wrong. Check the dictionary. There’s no A in proper. You don’t say it that way, its just lazy”
I was trying hard to remain somewhat civil here. “Its not lazy. Its Geordie.”
“That’s lazy”
How could she say such a thing!
She’s just totally turned her back on her routes.
According to her the only right English is Standard English.
I was aghast and then my sister joined in with such inconsistency that only she would be capable of mustering “But you always talk posh around your friends!”, adopting a stupid faux-posh accent: “Oh I’m Kaze. Yes. This is my mother. She is a teacher. I’m sooo posh”
“Of course I do! They only speak posh! If I was speaking to a Frenchman I’d speak French, I wouldn’t speak French to English people though would I? That’d be daft. Around Geordies you should speak Geordie!”
My aunt then decided to take this in a completely literal way though and questioned my French speaking abilities…Grrr. She just doesn’t get it. And sadly neither do so many others these days.
My parents recall long ago when we really did speak another language; my mother’s father, who is a total native of the area in particular. From one village to the next the dialects were radically different; you would have to try hard to understand someone from the next valley.
My grandfather used to use such extinct terms as ‘ken’ for care and ‘blaa’ for speech.
So many people today thing Geordie is just a silly accent. But its not, it’s so much more.
But…then there’s a problem with the whole ‘Geordie’ thing.
At One of my cousin piped in “I’m not a Geordie! I’m a Mackem.”
Whilst the Scots with their dialect of northern English have created a form called ‘Scots’ that they’ve actually got partial recognition as an official language for we can’t even decide on what ours is called.
There is no one all-encompassing term for the north east.
My family are of course Geordies. We’re from the mining area just south of the Tyne. But then over in Sunderland they insist they’re not Geordies but Mackems. And down in Middlesbrough they’re something else again. Ditto even in South Shields; a very small town on the coast.
Football has further messed this up, as in the case of m my cousin. ‘Mackem’, has become not just someone from the city of Sunderland but a Sunderland football supporter, Geordie has to a lesser degree become the same for Newcastle. I find that when I tell people I’m a Geordie they often just start talking about Newcastle United goings on with me.
We need a term for the whole of the North East but such a thing just can’t be found. What could it possibly be?
It all comes from the old Anglian kingdom of Northumberland. But the trouble with Northumbrian is that Northumberland is only a part of the north east today and to term the whole lot Northumberland is as iffy as calling it all Durham.
For the Angles the trouble is they’ve already given their name to English. Perhaps Anglish? But no…That’s probably a bit too looking into the past. And of course too like English.
We just can’t survive. Simple as that.
We’re going to be assimilated by the southners and all start speaking estuary English. Its been a ongoing process for decades and thanks to Scottish nationalism, the lack of any opportunities in the area and various other factors it seems set to continue.
When the time comes for me to have kids (heaven forbid) and making the silly assumption that I marry in the area and settle here I can just tell my kids will chastise me all the time for ‘speaking wrong’.
Of course our kids should all learn to speak ‘Standard English’, it’s the world language afterall. But does that mean we should totally abandon our language? The Dutch all speak perfect English these days. Have they decided to drop the Dutch language though?
We need to get away from this bollocks that any form of non-standard English just means you’re uneducated. It’s the same kind of crap that Welsh speakers went through until the second half of the 20th century. Except for us there was no reversal, no revival, and no backlash against the southern cultural creep.
We’re not in the ghetto here. Our using weird variations on English words isn’t something we’ve just started doing because we’re so poor these days.
We’re in the old kingdom of Northumberland, we’ve been here for over a millennium and have always had our own form of English. A language that is far more English than anything they speak in the south.
This just annoys me so much. Especially in light of the successes other marginalized peoples have had (the Scots in particular but that’s another story).
It’s the whole ‘A language is just a dialect with an army’ thing.
‘Northern’ should be just as valid a language as ‘Southern’ but due to the way history has turned out we’ve found ourselves being ruled by the south and so our way of speaking isn’t different. It’s just wrong.
Note: This was actually written back at the beginning of August. Its only now with the creation of this blog I'm now uploading it here.
