Mackem Mask Etiquette

[davidgillon]

Canny effort from the Mackems* below, and a sampling of Coronavirus signage from around the world in the Guardian article here.

 

 

(It reads:

Treat your mask like your undies

Dinnit touch it or rive at it, especially in public

Dinnit borrow one from ya marra or lend yours to them

Mack sure its canny tight but comfy

Mack sure its the reet way round

If its stained or hacky, hoy it in the bin

If its damp or foisty, change it

Dinnit gan commando!)

* Mackem: a person from Sunderland

Comments

[vass]

That is very good.

[green_knight]

+1

or rather, +1000.

[sovay]

Mackem Mask Etiquette

That's really nice.

[jesse_the_k]

That's lovely, and sent me down a delicious linguistic rabbit hole. Is Mackem spelling as standardized as Scottish, or is it eye-dialect peculiar to each writer?

Lots of detail -- new to me -- of linguistic variation in Northern England:

https://research.ncl.ac.uk/decte/toon/intro_to_ne_dialects.html

[davidgillon]

There's a lot of local variation in pronunciation, but spelling tends to be fairly constant. Pronunciation wise, it gets to where you can tell which village someone is from.

[jesse_the_k]

That's really impressive!

Especially because some of the changes -- the absent Great Vowel Shift in the North -- are so old and yet they've survived the homogenizing pressure of RP English on broadcast media for decades.

[davidgillon]

Well, it's easy if the village in question is the only one that's retained use of 'thou' ('thoo') ;) But most cases are a bit more subtle.

We've still got some dialect terms that have more in common with Norwegian/Germanic languages than RP, for instance 'hjem' ('yem') for home, and 'I'll larn yer' for 'I'll teach you', which draws on the Germanic 'lehren' rather than being the ignorant misuse of the RP verb 'learn' it's often presumed to be. And I've just seen something in poking about that notes that 'hoy', used in the poster, is a unique replacement of 'to throw'.

Hmmmm

[jesse_the_k]

I know very little about the US English dialects, but that's never stopped me from posting before.

Both "I'll learn you" and the double-modal "I might could make steak tonight" are common in Southern U.S. speech. Perhaps some Northern British immigrants brought those features over here?

Re: Hmmmm

[davidgillon]

We get everywhere ;)