Monophthongs and diphthongs in Tyneside: Two generations of Geordies

The formation and development of urban linguistic varieties have been the object of considerable attention in sociolinguistic studies throughout the second half of the last century and up to now. As has been widely attested (see for example Labov 1966, Milroy and Milroy 1978), a well-established trend is for such varieties to be more innovative than rural varieties. In particular, this paper will be looking at a characteristic feature of Tyneside English, a variety spoken in the North-East of England, in the area of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. In this variety, the RP diphthongs [eI] (as in name) and [«U] (as in boat) are traditionally pronounced as [I«] and [u«] respectively. A more recent trend, however, is to give up the traditional centering diphthongs in favour not so much of the RP closing diphthongs, but of the pan-northern monophthongs [e:] and [o:]. Though historically these forms are older than the centering diphthongs, their reintroduction constitutes an innovation. It is therefore expectable for speakers of urban varieties to adopt the monophthongised forms more readily than the inhabitants of the neighbouring rural areas. The aim of this study is therefore to show that younger speakers of the urban dialect of Newcastle (traditionally called Geordies) tend to substitute the pan-northern monophthongs for the traditional diphthongs much more often than the older generations of Geordies on the one hand, and than their rural counterparts on the other. In order to do so, data have been collected from three groups of subjects: older urban speakers (i.e. Newcastle born men between 50 and 70 years of age with at least one parent from Newcastle), young urban speakers (i.e. Newcastle born teenagers with both parents from Newcastle), young rural speakers (i.e. teenagers from the Tyneside village of Prudhoe). Since other factors such as gender and social class would have been discriminating, all subjects were male and belonged to the working class. The results appear to confirm the initial hypothesis: the use of the monophthongised forms is much more common among the young urban speakers than among the other two groups of subjects.