‘It isn’t geet good, like, but it’s

canny’: a new(ish) dialect

feature in North East England
MICHAEL PEARCE

An initial account of a relatively new interaction feature in

British English

Introduction geographically-based search protocol helped elim-

inate such ‘false positives’ as British colloquial
In recent years, linguists have become interested in
English ‘git’ (an unpleasant and annoying person)
‘interactional’ aspects of English: resources which
and ‘geet’ (a transliteration of गीत, the Hindi for
are used as two or more interlocutors dynamically
‘song’). The nature of social networking sites, in
adapt their expression to an ongoing exchange
which participants discuss and make arrangements
(Biber et al., 1999: 1045). This process occurs
about their social lives, forge and maintain relation-
mainly in conversation, but it is also an aspect of
ships, and convey aspects of their personality and
informal ‘dialogic’ writing. Features such as inten-
beliefs, means that the language – though written
sifiers (They sound really thick), colloquial dis-
– is often unguarded, highly informal and, in
course markers (You know he’s like upset that
some respects, speech-like (Hewings & North,
nobody got killed), and quotative forms (He went,
2010: 72–3). This combination of factors gener-
‘Gran’, and Gran went, ‘Yeah’)1 vary so widely
ates a high density of the kind of features I’m
and change so rapidly that they have attracted
interested in.
the attention of folk and professional linguists
I collected 150 examples of geet/git. In speech,
alike, and interesting work now regularly appears
the word is pronounced /giːʔ/ or /gɪʔ/ (note that
in the research literature (see, for example
the final consonant is almost always realized as a
Dailey-O’Cain, 2000, Ito and Tagliamonte, 2003,
glottal stop). There is some evidence which points
Anderson, 2006). My purpose in this article is to
to the pronunciation /giːʔ/ being associated with
offer an initial account of geet/git, a vernacular fea-
ture used in North East England. Drawing on data
from social websites, I explore the range of func-
tions it performs in discourse. In doing so, I hope
to contribute to a developing body of research MICHAEL PEARCE is
Senior Lecturer in English
which considers such features not only in terms
Language at the University
of their function, but also as markers of geographi- of Sunderland. Before
cal identity (see, for example, Macaulay’s work on moving to North East
pure in the west of Scotland (2006) and Bucholtz England he was a lecturer in
et al. (2007) on hella in Northern California). the School of English at the
In the spring of 2010 – using Google’s advanced University of Leeds. He has
search capabilities – I found all the publicly research interests in corpus
available web pages from MySpace and Bebo2 linguistics, perceptual
containing the terms geet or git together with dialectology and discourse analysis and is the
the name of one or more of the main centres of author of The Routledge Dictionary of English
Language Studies (2007).
population in North East England: Sunderland,
Email: mike.pearce@sunderland.ac.uk
Newcastle, Durham, and South Shields. This

doi:10.1017/S0266078411000307
English Today 107, Vol. 27, No. 3 (September 2011). Printed in the United Kingdom © 2011 Cambridge University Press 3
Tyneside and the north of the region, and /gɪʔ/ with
Wearside and the south (Burbano-Elizondo, 2008:
163–4). This variation in vowel length is reflected
in the two spellings. Of these 150 occurrences, the
spelling <geet> was used eighty-two times and
<git> sixty-eight times. From now on I will use
geet to represent both spellings of the form. In
what follows I provide an overview of geet,
based on my examination of this small but fascinat-
ing corpus, and conclude with some thoughts on its
historical development.
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.
Geet as an intensifying adverb and adjective
An intensifier modifies the quantity, quality or
intensity of the element it accompanies. Ito and
Tagliamonte (2003: 258–9), drawing on obser-
vations from a range of scholars, suggest that inten-
sifiers play a key role in ‘social and emotional
expression’ due to the ways in which they allow
a speaker to influence a listener’s reception of the
message by impressing, praising, persuading,
insulting, and so on. This makes them a valuable
resource in the context of social networking sites,
where people routinely engage in dynamic forms
of self-display.
Geet is frequently used adverbially to intensify
the meaning conveyed in the following adjectival
head. In these examples, geet performs an analo-
gous function to items such as ‘really’, ‘very’,
‘completely’, and so on:
(1) aah he’s git canny
(2) your songs on here are geet good
(3) its git shite like
(4) am geet bored
(5) am geet excited
Table 1: Relative frequency of uses of geet
N %
Intensifying adverb 59 39.3
Intensifying adjective 17 11.3
Discourse marker 45 30
Quotative 29 19.3
4 ENGLISH TO DAY 107
(6) ur git hard as owt !!!
(7) im geet lazy
One third of the adjectival heads occurring with
geet convey general evaluation, and most of these
are positive (e.g. good, canny). A minority, how-
ever, are negative (e.g. shite).3 Others relate to
human cognitive states or characteristics (e.g.
bored, lazy). In the corpus, adjectives from other
semantic domains are also intensified by geet,
including bright, cold, curly, dangerous, drunk,
fast, funny, interesting, long, popular.
As with more widespread intensifiers such as
‘very’ and ‘really’, geet can also be used to modify
adverbs, although there are only a few examples in
the corpus:
(8) i know her bf4 geet well and that so its canny
More often, geet occurs with verbs which are
capable of showing degrees of activity, usually to
indicate a high intensity of that activity:
(9) am still recoverin off goin out on thursday
nyt lyk am git achein all ova
(10) aye me and shawn git bitch about her in
science lyk
(11) lauren [SURNAME]’s fone went ov a was
geet creaseing man
(12) all the old ladies were git knocking on the
door
(13) i thought id lost you and started geet
panicking
Just over eleven per cent of occurrences of geet
are as an adjective intensifier. Some signify large
size or extent:
(14) had a geet egg on the side of me face
However, most adjectival occurrences have a
general evaluative or emotive meaning denoting
judgment or emphasis:
(15) i remember the days when u went with renton
and i was a geet emo
(16) ill hav 2 ask the geet computer genious that is
louise
As an adjective geet occurs only as a premo-
difier, so that geet life story is acceptable, whereas
my life story is geet is not.
Geet as a discourse marker
In thirty per cent of occurrences, geet is functioning
as a discourse marker. Its main use is as a high-
lighting device signalling non-contrastive focus.
It can occur before a noun phrase:
(17) Havent seen you in geet ages
September 2011
(18) i’ll get more drunk and spend more than geet
£15 on a night out
(19) wasnt drinkn was on geet coke n j2o :| lol
(20) a dunno if u know her she was geet my geet
manager in teleclaims
It also occurs before an adverb or adverb phrase,
and before a prepositional phrase functioning as
subject complement:
(21) No but honestly, I wasnt meaning it git
nastily
(22) we go back 2 school in 12 daiis am geet on
count down
(23) ha walked past u tonight lol was geet in me
shorts nd hat lol
(24) its git about the economy and interest rates
and tax and spending and shit
Before a verb phrase:
(25) he git dropped me off at home this morning
(26) i git slept with yay last neet
And also in a verb phrase between the auxiliary
and the verb, and between the infinitive marker to
and the base form of the verb:
(27) she was git taking pictures nd the camera had
the stupid flash on
(28) i was geet working it out in my head
(29) al be geet telling you everything tht he says if
he says oot
(30) I’ll have to geet send you a copy
Geet can also occur before a subordinate clause:
(31) i start git retreating slowly to where its less
rough ahahah
(32) he made me git go out and take pictures of
something which is like me
In just one instance it is used to ‘launch’ an utter-
ance (geet have a good day n that like).
As a discourse marker, geet operates in a similar
way to like. Indeed, in examples (17) – (32), geet
could happily be replaced with like (see Underhill,
1988 for an overview of the syntax and pragmatics
of like as a discourse marker). Furthermore, many
of the ‘utterances’ in the corpus contain like:
(33) still like git close with grace and then sarah
[SURNAME] but shes like year below
(34) they were like asking for a spliff and they
were all geet freaks haha
(35) sorry i was git quiet last night like
(36) 17 again isnt geet good like, but its canny
(37) git boring sometimes like
(38) been geet ages like!
(39) I’m still geet poorly like
‘IT ISN ’T GEET GOOD, LI KE, BUT IT’S CA NNY’
(40) aye me and shawn git bitch about her in
science lyk
In these examples like occurs most often
clause-finally: a position not occupied by geet in
the corpus. In examples (35) – (40) replacing like
with geet would seem to be inadmissible. This
restriction is possibly due to the widespread use
of like in the North East as an emphatic device in
clause-final position (Beal, 2004: 136). It is so
well-established that innovatory geet seems unable
to displace it.
Geet as a quotative
Just as geet and like function in a broadly similar
way as focusers, so quotative be geet has certain
parallels with quotative be like. In English,
reported speech or thought can be introduced in a
variety of ways. In recent years, be like and be
all have been widely remarked upon in the socio-
linguistic literature (see for example Romaine and
Lange, 1991, Tagliamonte and Hudson, 1999 and
Buchstaller, 2006). Be geet seems to be a relatively
recent (albeit highly localized) addition to the quo-
tative resources of English, which perhaps devel-
oped by analogy with be like. Tagliamonte and
Hudson (1999: 152) outline the evolution of quota-
tive like, which originated in the USA in the early
1980s. They suggest that it was ‘first used for dra-
matic effect in introducing non-lexicalized sounds
as well as encoding the inner thoughts and emotion
states of the speaker which may or may not have
been actually spoken at the time of the event . . .
and only subsequently spread to direct speech’.
In the corpus, be geet performs all the functions
identified by Tagliamonte and Hudson.
(41) i was geet ehhhhh
(42) i was git AHH
(43) i was git i have them towels
(44) i was git ohh Shit wer gunna all get fukin
killed haahaa
(45) stacey was git ‘wheres me burger then’
(46) eee when we went to tha ballay lol a was git
“LOOK AT HIS BULGE HAHA”
In (41) and (42) ehhhhh and AHH could be
approximations of the sound made by the writers
when the incidents being narrated took place, or
attempts to communicate a sense of what they
were feeling at the time (which somehow lies
beyond words). In (43) and (44) the thoughts rather
than the actual words of the writer are probably
being reported, while in (45) and (46) it seems –
particularly given the presence of speech marks –
that actual utterances are being quoted.
5
 Box 1: Gey, gay, gaie, gaye, gie, gy as an intensifier (examples from DSL, OED and Griffiths, 2005)

a. Your Enemies (of which..yo’ve had a gay convenient number) (Scotland, 1686)
b. I thought her ance a gay smart lass (Mearns, North East Scotland, 1799)
c. A Lowlander had an occasion to visit Loch Buy, at Moy. “Well, what think you of this spot?” said a gentleman,
“Ah! Sir, it is a gaie bonnie place to be out of the world.” (Scotland, 1809)
d. I ken I’m gay thick in the head (Scotland, 1816)
e. We’ve come, doctor, to ask a gaye queer question (Scotland, 1835)
f. I had taen a gie erly brekfast that mornin’ an’ I dae think I niver felt as hungry in a’ my life (Ulster, Ireland, 1879)
g. I’ve seen him colloguing with some gey queer acquaintances (Scotland, 1893)
h. Some said she would make ‘a gey good schoolmistress’ (Northern Ireland, 1913)
i. It’s that Yard Seam that’s troubling them, Paddy. That seam’s worried them for a gay long time (County Durham,
North East England, 1935)
j. She’s gey hard up (County Durham, North East England, 1938)
k. Had he not been gie on edge already, he’d have been smoored among them (North East Scotland, 1952)
l. Fadder hed gay strang views aboot cooken ov a Sunda (Cumbria, North West England, 1978)
m. A lot of big black buildings and a gey smoky environment (Scotland, 1991)
n. So this man gets nearer. Jane goes, maybe he’s got lost? I go, must be gy donnert as all the shops and that are down
the hill (southern Scotland, 1999)
o. It was gey near the middle ae the day afore he feenished (central Scotland, 2001)

imports (see Pearce, 2009 for an overview of the

Etymology
Where does this intriguing multifunctional feature
come from? A connection with Scots gey has
been proposed by Beal (1993: 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 ‘con-
siderably’, ‘very’. There are certainly parallels
with geet, as the citations from DSL, OED and
Griffiths’ A Dictionary of North East Dialect
(2005) 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, 2005: xvii–
xviii) points out that in the seventeenth and eight-
eenth 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
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 voi-
celess stops is common in Tyneside, an underlying
/t/ may have been added by inference’ (1993:210).
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 pro-
nunciation in North East England (Orton and
Halliday, 1963: 982), and Griffiths’ entry for
great includes the following citations from the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: for a greet
while; a grit big bird; greet surprise (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 ‘uvu-
lar realization of /r/: usually a voiced uvular frica-
tive [ʁ], occasionally a uvular tap or velar
fricative’ (Wells, 1982: 368). This has been reced-
ing in North East England, and was perhaps par-
ticularly vulnerable when following a velar such
as /g/. The loss of /r/ from the initial consonant

6 ENGLISH TO DAY 107 September 2011

 Box 2: Great, grit, greate, greit, grete as an intensifier (examples from DSL and OED)

a. Quhen this thing was to his Hienes kend, Grit glaid he was (Scotland, 1075)
b. We ar not grit amervellit of this deid (Scotland, 1257)
c. Lodwick he thocht greit lang (Scotland, 1515)
d. Now Ioachim..was a greate rich man (England, 1535)
e. Thys yere was a grete dere yere (England, 1556)
f. Say that he thriue, as ’tis great like he will (England, 1593)
g. Horses that labour great, Are cast in ditches for the Dogges to eate (England, 1609)
h. Great, very; as ‘great much’, very much (Kent, 1736)
i. Great likly, very likely. ‘Ay, ay, great likly, great likly’ (Yorkshire, 1855)

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, 2006).
Another question is provoked by the historical
evidence. If gey was once an option for intensifica-
tion in North East England, what happened to it?
The Newcastle Electronic Corpus of Tyneside
English (NECTE),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 appar-
ent 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, 2005: 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 wide-
spread tendency for young people since the
1990s to use gay to mean ‘bad, in poor

Box 3: Examples of North East dialect in the corpus

accent stylization and

localized paralinguistic
features
<heeeed> (head); <hu> (how);
< na> (know); <neet> (night);
< owa> (our); <alreet> all right;
<ova> (over); <fing> (thing);
<aaal> (all); <hallow> (hello);
< eee > , <eeeeeeee > , <eesh >
Grammar
Personal pronouns: a (I); am
(I’m); al (I’ll); ya, ye, yee, yay,
yahh, yas, yez (you); is, izz (us);
a, ha (her)
Impersonal pronouns: owt, oot
(anything); summit, smit
(something)
Demonstrative determiners:
them (those)
Lexical verb forms: knew
(known); seen (saw); broke
(broken)
Auxiliary verb forms: dinnit
(don’t)
Lexis
Verbs: gan (going), gans (goes);
hoyed (past tense of hoy – to
throw, chuck); choring (stealing)
Nouns: lass (girl)
Adjectives: mint (excellent); lush
(excellent); canny (fine,
admirable, good)
Endearments: pet
Response forms: aye, ayee (yes);
nar, ner (no); weyyii (of course)
Intensifiers: proper, canny

‘IT ISN ’T GEET GOOD, LI KE, BUT IT’S CA NNY’ 7

taste, socially inept or unsophisticated’ (Thorne,
2007: 180).
Discussion and conclusion
An outline of the development of geet can be ten-
tatively sketched. At some point in the nineteenth
century, probably as a consequence of immigration
from Scotland, gey began to be used as an inten-
sifier 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 dis-
course 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 pure gorgeous) but also as
a focuser (is she pure standing at that windae;
she pure gies 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 verna-
cular item, which like geet and pure has extended
its function from intensifier to pragmatic marker,
is hella. Bucholtz et al. (2007: 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 hella put off my courtdate too; You
hella took me outta your top 8; You’re hella sitting
right next to me (in these instances, hella is a focu-
ser, 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
8 ENGLISH TO DAY 107
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 inten-
sifier. 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, knowl-
edge’). In Scotland, it is often used to refer to qual-
ities such as shrewdness, cautiousness and thrift;
or skilfulness, cunning and wisdom. In the North
East, canny is historically associated with approval
or approbation (Griffiths, 2005: 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 canny good like; it was canny cold like;
Durham is canny shit. Canny, like geet, is a
relatively recent addition to the resources for inten-
sification in North East English and – as with geet –
it will be interesting to track its progress over the
next few years.
Notes
1 These examples are from the British National Corpus
<http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/>
2 Social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo
allow members to create a ‘profile’ (a public face
which can be manipulated to reflect a user’s personal-
ity), and to communicate with other members through
‘posts’.
3 Shite is functioning adjectivally here.
4 Bf is an initialism meaning ‘boyfriend’.
5 NECTE <http://research.ncl.ac.uk/necte/>
September 2011
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