Geordie People
The terms Geordie or Geordie’s probably originated from the fact that the miners in the north east coalfields used George Stephenson’s safety lamps to prevent underground explosions, rather than the Davy lamp which was more commonplace. If that’s true then maybe Geordies have George Stephenson to thank for not having the nickname “Davies” instead.
The term also used to encompass the people living in the north east areas of Sunderland and Middlesbrough but this has been dropped by a large proportion of the people in these areas where many people now seem to prefer to be recognised as Mackem’s or Smoggie’s respectively.
In reality the origin of the term Geordie is a bit of a moot point because wherever the collective term for the north east people originated, what can not be disputed is that true Geordies are very proud of the nickname and except in exceptional circumstances never feel belittled by the very common practice other people in the UK have for using their surname to distinguish them from other Geordies.
This this can be easily seen by inputting the name Geordie followed by a surname into the Google search engine where at the last count for example there were 226,000 different search results for Geordie Smith.
Watch the following video clips
to get a better insight into the language, accent and character of the Geordie people.
Date: June 30, 2010
