The term Geordie refers to someone who has been raised in and around the city of Newcastle and the accompanying counties of Tyneside.
Many people would have heard this term being used to describe the followers and supporters of the Newcastle United Football Club as they are often labeled as Geordies by sports commentators and newspaper journalists.
The known rivals of Newcastle United FC, Sunderland were once also known as Geordies, until football rivalry forced the Sunderland crowd to break away from the term in and around the late 1980s, as they did not want to be associated with Newcastle in any way.
If you have never heard someone speak in a strong Geordie accent before, it may come as a shock to you and you may find some words difficult to comprehend.
Here we will give you some common examples of spoken terms used in the Geordie dialect: ‘alreet’ (alright), ‘hyem’ (home) and ‘nowt’ (nothing).
A lot of the elements of this vocabulary have been inherited from Old English, whereas the lower end of the country has updated to Standard English phrases, this could be because the north was not as affected by the Norman Conquest compared to how the south was.
There are a few arguments over where the actual term Geordie originally derived from, all of the theories have little evidence to be able to prove the true origin.
Some say that it is because miners in the area used to use lamps named Geordie Safety Lamps that had been designed by George Stephenson around 1895 while other mining communities in the surrounding area used Davy Lamps, which made a dissimilarity amongst the communities.