Becoming a Geordie by long proximity

An invaluable guide. Well, quite entertaining anyway.

A few years ago in a post about rendering accent in writing, I mentioned that after 10 years of living among Geordies I'd attempted to write a Geordie character, only for OneMonkey to recoil in horror at my ineptitude. Well, a couple of weeks ago I had another go (completely different story, and characters) and this one passed muster. I'm not saying it would fool a native, just that OneMonkey judged it bearable.

I had a feeling I might do better this time, I can now read and interpret the whole of the 1960s educational pamphlet Larn Yersel' Geordie, even if I can't say most of it out loud. I have understood each one of OneMonkey's uncles in normal conversation, and barely notice that his dad speaks a completely different dialect from me. Despite living back in West Yorkshire ('the South' as OneMonkey calls it) for years, I appear to be morphing slowly into a North East native, scoring 100% on the Chronicle's How Geordie Are You? quiz (though I'm not convinced of its scientific accuracy...) and recognising more than half of these You know you're a Geordie when... signs in myself. Time to go recalibrate myself with some Yorkshire dialect poems.