The Secret History Buried in the Geordie Accent

A monk who died in the year 735 could follow the Geordie accent more easily than the English you hear on the news. That's not a figure of speech. It's what the linguistics actually says. Newcastle has one of the most mocked accents in Britain, but Geordie is one of the oldest living forms of English there is. A direct line back to Anglo-Saxon kings, Viking raiders who mostly never arrived, and a lost kingdom whose borders you can still hear today. This is 15 things the Geordie dialect is quietly hiding about 1,000 years of history, from the words nobody can explain to a vanishing thousand-year-old sound. Covered along the way: where the word Geordie really comes from, why it shares so much with Scots, the Viking myth about the North East, why "gan" is older than "go", and the Venerable Bede's connection to how Tyneside still talks.