ABSTRACT
The modern counties of Northumberland and Tyne and Wear, occupying as they do the extreme North-Eastern corner of England, are geographically closer to the Lowlands of Scotland than to the seat of government in Southern England. As we shall see this proximity to Scotland is reflected in the linguistic characteristics of the area. Indeed, the Northumbrian and Lowland Scots dialects share a common origin in the Anglian dialect of the early kingdom of Northumbria. This kingdom originally extended from Doncaster to the River Forth, with a division into the Northern sector of Bernicia and the Southern Deira marked by the River Tees. Thus, the same dialect of Old English was spoken on both sides of what is now the Scottish border, at least in the East of the country. In fact, the first part of the kingdom to undergo linguistic influences leading to a divergent development of the dialect was Deira: the Danish invasions of the eighth and ninth centuries affected the southern half of the kingdom far more than Bernicia, so that extensive Scandinavian influence is found in the dialects of what are now Yorkshire, Humberside and Cleveland far more than in those of Northumberland and Tyneside. The River Tees is still recognized as an important linguistic boundary: for instance, the definite article is not realized as a glottal stop north of the Tees (‘down t'road’) and the dropping of h was not found north of Darlington until relatively recently: it has now moved as far north as Sunderland.
