Tag archives: Geordie English
Sound and fury: cockney ducks and mimicking politicians
Language has always been more fashion than science: as Bill Bryson once said, the way we use it ‘wanders around like hemlines’. A couple of weeks ago, the Washington newspaper the Olympian ran an article headed ‘When visiting the South, please leave fake accent at home’. Its writer, Kathleen Parker, finds political charlatan accents among [...]
Canny lads and radgie gadgies
And they’re like ‘what does canny mean?’ With this complaint, a 20-year-old from Gateshead whose data is recorded in the new Diachronic Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (DECTE) explains that on occasion some of her fellow students, who weren’t fortunate enough to grow up in the North East, just don’t get what she’s talking about. [...]
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