Alreet lads and lasses! Has it gannin?
I’ve made catalogue of Northumbrian and Geordie dialect words.
Some of them are unique to the area, some are found in other British dialects. Some are common, some are dying out, spoken only by a few older people.
For each word, I have tried to give the most likely etymology, with colours showing the language of origin.
I’ve tried to limit the number of words that are just different pronunciations of English words (like “heed” for head), because that would be nearly every word!
I got most of my information from encyclopedias and dictionaries of the dialect, and I can’t be certain all my data is 100% correct. For words where the etymology is very uncertain, I have put question marks, and my best guesses.
Since there were too many words to make a single image (and since half of those words were nouns), I have made 2 charts: Part One (nouns) and Part Two (not nouns).
Read on for my brief explanation for all this variety:
I grew up in a tiny town, hidden up in the hills of northern England. The town is called Alston, and the people there are English. However, many of them speak a language that most English speakers would hardly recognise.
A dialect (or perhaps even a separate language) with a long and fascinating history.
The Old Northumbrian dialect began diverging from other Old English dialects over 1400 years ago, when the first Anglo Saxon kingdoms began to form in England.
The dialect was heavily influenced by the Norse speaking Vikings during the Danelaw, a period from about about 867 to 927 AD during which northern England was ruled by Vikings, and many towns (including my own hometown) were founded.
After the Vikings left, the Normans invaded from the south, which drastically changed the English language. But this influence was not felt as strongly in thew North, where the old, Germanic words were favoured. And so many words and pronunciations that were lost hundreds of years ago down south are still common up here.
That Old Northumbrian dialect has since branched into several distinct dialects/languages, including modern Northumbrian, Geordie (Newcastle), Cumbrian, Pitmatic (Durham), Yorkshire, Scottish English, and Scots.
Some more recent additions come from much further away. Many Romani people chose to end their centuries of migrations from India by settling in the north of England, and lending their words to us. And so there are words in the dialect that are closely related to Hindi words!
“stot” – to bounce – in Dutch it’s “stouteren” so could be Old Dutch origin?