Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T15:15:33.557Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

‘It isn't geet good, like, but it's canny’: a new(ish) dialect feature in North East England

An initial account of a relatively new interaction feature in British English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2011

Michael Pearce
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In recent years, linguists have become interested in ‘interactional’ aspects of English: resources which are used as two or more interlocutors dynamically adapt their expression to an ongoing exchange (Biber et al., 1999: 1045). This process occurs mainly in conversation, but it is also an aspect of informal ‘dialogic’ writing. Features such as intensifiers (They soundreallythick), colloquial discourse markers (You know he'slikeupset that nobody got killed), and quotative forms (Hewent, ‘Gran’, and Granwent, ‘Yeah’) vary so widely and change so rapidly that they have attracted the attention of folk and professional linguists alike, and interesting work now regularly appears in the research literature (see, for example Dailey-O'Cain, 2000, Ito and Tagliamonte, 2003, Anderson, 2006). My purpose in this article is to offer an initial account of geet/git, a vernacular feature used in North East England. Drawing on data from social websites, I explore the range of functions it performs in discourse. In doing so, I hope to contribute to a developing body of research which considers such features not only in terms of their function, but also as markers of geographical identity (see, for example, Macaulay's work on pure in the west of Scotland (2006) and Bucholtz et al. (2007) on hella in Northern California).

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 2011 , pp. 3 - 9
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, W. 2006. ‘“Absolutely, totally, filled to the brim with the Famous Grouse”: intensifying adverbs in the Scottish Corpus of Texts and Speech.’ English Today, 22(3), 10–16.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ayto, J. 2005. Word Origins. London: A. & C. Black.Google Scholar
Beal, J. 1993. ‘The grammar of Tyneside and Northumbrian English.’ In , J. & Milroy, L. (eds), Real English: The Grammar of English Dialects in the British Isles. London: Longman, pp. 187–213.Google Scholar
Beal, J. 2004. ‘English dialects in the north of England: morphology and syntax.’ In Schneider, E. W., Burridge, K., Kortmann, B., Mesthrie, R. & Upton, C. (eds), A Handbook of Varieties of English Volume 2: Morphology and Syntax. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 114–41.Google Scholar
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. & Finegan, E. 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Bucholtz, M., Bermudez, N., Fung, V., Edwards, L. & Rosalva, V. 2007. ‘Hella Nor Cal or totally So Cal? The perceptual dialectology of California.’ Journal of English Linguistics, 35(4), 325–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Buchstaller, I. 2006. ‘Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: attitudes towards the “new” quotatives in the UK.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 10(3), 326–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burbano-Elizondo, L. 2008. ‘Language variation and identity in Sunderland.’ Unpublished PhD thesis. Sheffield: University of Sheffield.Google Scholar
Dailey-O'Cain, J. 2000. ‘The sociolinguistic distribution of and attitudes toward focuser like and quotative like.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(1), 60–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL). Online at <http://www.dsl.ac.uk/> (Accessed May 14, 2010).+(Accessed+May+14,+2010).>Google Scholar
Griffiths, B. 2005. A Dictionary of North East Dialect, 2nd edn.Newcastle: Northumbria University Press.Google Scholar
Hewings, A. & North, S. 2010. ‘Texts and practices.’ In Maybin, J. & Swann, J. (eds), The Routledge Companion to English Language Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 42–75.Google Scholar
Ito, R. & Tagliamonte, S. 2003. ‘Well weird, right dodgy, very strange, really cool: layering and recycling in English intensifiers.’ Language in Society, 32(2), 257–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, R. 2006. ‘Pure grammaticalization: the development of a teenage intensifier.’ Language Variation and Change, 18(3), 267–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Orton, H. & Halliday, W. J. 1963. Survey of English Dialects: (B) The Basic Material. Volume 1. The Six Northern Counties and the Isle of Man, Part III. Leeds: E. J. Arnold & Son.Google Scholar
Pearce, M. 2009. ‘A perceptual dialect map of North East England.’ Journal of English Linguistics, 37(2), 162–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Romaine, S. & Lange, D. 1991. ‘The use of like as a marker of reported speech and thought: a case of grammaticalization in progress.’ American Speech, 66(3), 227–79.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tagliamonte, S. & Hudson, R. 1999. ‘Be like et al. beyond America: the quotative system in British and Canadian youth.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(2), 147–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thorne, T. 2007. Dictionary of Contemporary Slang. London: A. & C. Black.Google Scholar
Underhill, R. 1988. ‘Like is, like, focus.’ American Speech, 63(3), 234–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, J. C. 1982. Accents of English 2: The British Isles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar