Geet in use

In the corpus, geet is used in four main ways: as an intensifying adverb, as an intensifying adjective, as a discourse marker and as a ‘quotative’. Table 1 gives the frequency of occurrence in each category.

Table 1:

Relative frequency of uses of geet

Etymology

Where does this intriguing multifunctional feature come from? A connection with Scots gey has been proposed by Beal (Reference Beal, and Milroy1993: 210). The Dictionary of the Scots Language (DSL) records how gey as an adjective can be used to convey approval (‘fine’, ‘excellent’, ‘good’) and size and extent (‘considerable’, ‘good sized’), and as an intensifier it is roughly synonymous with ‘considerably’, ‘very’. There are certainly parallels with geet, as the citations from DSL, OED and Griffiths' A Dictionary of North East Dialect (Reference Griffiths2005) in Box 1 illustrate. In these examples, gey is functioning as an intensifier, and is being used in much the same way as geet in contemporary North East English. The geographical spread and date range suggest that gey arose in Scotland, later spreading to the north of Ireland and northern England. Scotland and North East England share a long history of population movement and other forms of economic and cultural interaction. For example, Mitcalfe (1937, in Griffiths, Reference Griffiths2005: xvii–xviii) points out that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many of the keelmen (who worked transporting coal by boat along the rivers Tyne and Wear) were originally from Scotland and there was a further influx of Scottish immigrants during the exploitation of the Great Northern Coalfield in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gey as an intensifier might have been among their linguistic imports (see Pearce, Reference Pearce2009 for an overview of the sociolinguistic contexts of English in North East England).

However, if geet is simply a North East ‘version’ of gey how can we account for the change of form? Beal suggests that ‘Scots /ei/ would correspond to Tyneside /iː/, and, since glottalization of final voiceless stops is common in Tyneside, an underlying /t/ may have been added by inference’ (Reference Beal, and Milroy1993:210). The first part of this explanation seems reasonable; the second part less so. An alternative, or perhaps additional, source for geet (which at least provides a more robust explanation for the presence of final /t/) might be a broadly northern form of great with an /ɪ/ or /i:/ vowel, a form reflected in vernacular spellings such as <grit > , <gritt> and <greet>. The Survey of English Dialects attests to this pronunciation in North East England (Orton and Halliday, Reference Orton and Halliday1963: 982), and Griffiths' entry for great includes the following citations from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: for a greetwhile; a gritbig bird; greetsurprise (2005: 74). But this still leaves the problem of the missing /r/ in geet. Its absence might be linked to the loss of the Northumbrian ‘burr’, which consists of a ‘uvular realization of /r/: usually a voiced uvular fricative [ʁ], occasionally a uvular tap or velar fricative’ (Wells, Reference Wells1982: 368). This has been receding in North East England, and was perhaps particularly vulnerable when following a velar such as /g/. The loss of /r/ from the initial consonant cluster could also be a consequence of metathesis: some modern dialects have metathetic forms of great which are captured in vernacular spellings such as <gert > , <girt> and <gurt>.

A further reason for linking geet with great is the fact that variants of great have been used as an intensifier across a thousand year time span in England and Scotland (see Box 2). Admittedly though, these examples are not as convincing as analogues of geet as are the examples of gey (for more on gey in Scots and Scottish English see Anderson, Reference Anderson2006).

Another question is provoked by the historical evidence. If gey was once an option for intensification in North East England, what happened to it? The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside English (NECTE),Footnote ⁵ which archives sociolinguistic interviews recorded in the late 1960s and early 1990s, does not contain intensifier gey, but there are several instances of geet. So while geet has been used as an intensifier in North East England since at least the 1960s, the latest evidence I have so far uncovered for gey is 1938 (Box 1, example j). One very speculative explanation for the apparent decline of gey and the rise of geet relates to the main twentieth century sense of the adjective gay: ‘homosexual’. It first came into general use in the 1950s (Ayto, Reference Ayto2005: 240) and as this sense became more widespread it might have inhibited speakers from using gey as an intensifier, thus increasing the opportunities for the spread of geet. An additional inhibiting factor might be the widespread tendency for young people since the 1990s to use gay to mean ‘bad, in poor taste, socially inept or unsophisticated’ (Thorne, Reference Thorne2007: 180).

Discussion and conclusion

An outline of the development of geet can be tentatively sketched. At some point in the nineteenth century, probably as a consequence of immigration from Scotland, gey began to be used as an intensifier in North East England, later to be superseded by geet (which is perhaps related to an r-less form of northern great). Gey and geet as intensifiers, as we have seen, are not new phenomena in the North East. But what is new is the way in which people are now using geet as a discourse marker and quotative. Such usages were not uncovered in research undertaken by the Durham & Tyneside Dialect Group in 2001 which formed the basis of many of the most up to date citations in Griffiths' Dictionary of North East Dialect (2005). Therefore it might be reasonable to regard them as innovations of the last ten years or so. The trajectory of development from intensifier to discourse marker to quotative is not unique to geet. Macaulay (2006) records several instances of Glaswegian adolescents using pure not only as an intensifier (as in he's puregorgeous) but also as a focuser (is she purestanding at that windae; she puregies us rock solid hard work now) and as a quotative: I was pure“Naw”; and she's pure“You got it wrong” (275–8). Another vernacular item, which like geet and pure has extended its function from intensifier to pragmatic marker, is hella. Bucholtz et al. (Reference Bucholtz, Bermudez, Fung, Edwards and Rosalva2007: 342–3) in their study of the perceptual dialectology of California, claim that hella – an abbreviation of ‘hell of a’ – is a ‘crucial shibboleth separating the two major regions of the state’. Interestingly, they make no reference to hella as a discourse marker, describing it as ‘a quantifier (There were hella people there) and an intensifier (He runs hella fast)’. But an advanced Google search of MySpace and Bebo for ‘hella’ and ‘California’ reveals ‘utterances’ such as They hellaput off my courtdate too; You hellatook me outta your top 8; You're hellasitting right next to me (in these instances, hella is a focuser, not a quantifier or an intensifier). In May 2010 I could find no MySpace or Bebo evidence for be hella as a quotative, but a broader search did result in a few online examples (e.g. i was hella“oH sHiT!” when i saw it). The research on which Bucholtz et al.'s paper was based was carried out in 2003–2004, so it seems that in seven years hella has expanded its range of functions, and we might predict that be hella will enter into competition with be like as a quotative, at least in Northern California.

Geet, hella and pure differ from more widely used interaction features such as like, really, totally in that they are geographically restricted and therefore capable of acting as markers of regional identity. In the pages I visited in assembling my geet corpus it was striking to see the ways in which non-standard grammar and lexis, together with orthographic accent stylizations, are deployed. Box 3 gives examples of features found in the immediate vicinity of the 150 occurrences of geet in the corpus. One feature particularly worth noting in relation to geet is the use of canny as an intensifier. As an adjective, of course, canny has a long and well-attested history in the North East. It appears in the titles of traditional songs (‘Hi Canny Man, Hoy a Ha'Penny Oot’), it is an epithet for the region's major city (‘Canny Newcastle’), and is often used in the names of shops and businesses (‘Canny Carpet Clean’). According to the OED it is not found before the seventeenth century, having apparently developed from the verb can (‘to know how’, ‘be able’) and/or the derived Scots noun can (‘skill, knowledge’). In Scotland, it is often used to refer to qualities such as shrewdness, cautiousness and thrift; or skilfulness, cunning and wisdom. In the North East, canny is historically associated with approval or approbation (Griffiths, Reference Griffiths2005: 27). Griffiths, while noting adverbial uses of canny, including meanings relating to Standard English ‘agreeably’ and ‘carefully’, does not record any instances of it functioning as an intensifier. But this usage is certainly evident on MySpace and Bebo, with no apparent restrictions on the semantic domains of the adjectives it collocates with: the one you sent me was cannygood like; it was cannycold like; Durham is cannyshit. Canny, like geet, is a relatively recent addition to the resources for intensification in North East English and – as with geet – it will be interesting to track its progress over the next few years.

Box 3: Examples of North East dialect in the corpus