Geordie is a regional nickname for a person from the Tyneside region of England, or the name of the English dialect spoken by its inhabitants. Depending on who is using the term, the catchment area for the term Geordie can be as big as the whole north east of England, or as small as the city of Newcastle upon Tyne. Sunderland, however, uses the regional nickname "Mackem" as opposed to Geordie. Similarly, people from the Teesside area (Middlesbrough, Stockton-on-Tees, Redcar, Billingham and surrounding settlements) are known as "Teessiders", or through derision as "Smoggies".
In most aspects Geordie speech is a direct continuation and development of the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxon settlers of this region. Initially mercenaries employed by the Ancient Brythons to fight the Pictish invaders after the end of Roman rule in Britannia in the 5th century, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who thus arrived became, over time, ascendant politically and - through population transfer from tribal homelands in northern Europe - culturally over the native British. The Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms that emerged during the Dark Ages spoke mutually intelligible varieties of Old English, each varying somewhat in phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. Thus, in northern England, dominated by the Kingdom of Northumbria, was found a distinct 'Northumbrian' Old English dialect. Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the forebear of Modern English; but while the modern dialects of most other English regions have been much changed by the influences of other foreign languages, Norman-French and Norse in particular, the modern dialects of Northern England (including Geordie), remain closer to the sounds and words of the 'Northumbrian' Anglo-Saxon dialect, thus featuring many characteristics of Old English lost in Standard English.
