The Plague Dogs

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In 1715, when the Scotch Jacobites rose against the newly crowned English King George I, the citizens of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, near the English-Scotch border, shut the city’s gates against the southward-moving rebels, thus contributing to their defeat. The disgruntled rebels nicknamed them “Geordies” (the North Country pronunciation of “Georgie”) and this became the term for any inhabitant of Tyneside, or of Northumberland and Durham generally, as well as for the dialect spoken there.

Of all dialects spoken in the British Isles, Geordie, to a foreign visitor, is the hardest to understand. Listen to Tyneside workingmen talking among themselves and in all probability you’ll understand hardly a word. This is largely because, as recently as a thousand years ago, this area of England—the Scottish border—formed part of the Danish Viking realm. Many Geordie words (e.g., hyem, meaning home) are Scandinavian, and several are entirely different from their English counterparts. (E.g., hoy = throw; clarts = mud, dirt; lum = chimney etc.) It is almost another language.

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