Mackem
Encyclopedia
Mackem is a term that refers to the accent, dialect and people of the Wearside
Wearside
Wearside is an area of north east England, centred on the continuous urban area formed by Sunderland, Seaham and other settlements by the River Wear. Mackems is a nickname used for the people of Wearside....

 area, or more specifically Sunderland, a city in North East England
North East England
North East England is one of the nine official regions of England. It covers Northumberland, County Durham, Tyne and Wear, and Teesside . The only cities in the region are Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland...

. Spelling variations include "Mak'em", "Makem", and "Maccam".

Origin

Evidence suggests the term is a recent coinage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

, which with the BBC carried out a well-publicised search for references, the earliest occurrence of it in print was in 1988, although the phrase "we still tak 'em and mak 'em" was found in a sporting context in 1973 in reference to Sunderland Cricket & Rugby Football Club. While this lends support to the theory that this phrase was the origin of the term Mackem, there is nothing to suggest that "mak 'em" had come to be applied to people from Sunderland generally at such a date. The name Mackem is often claimed to have been used by"Geordie
Geordie
Geordie is a regional nickname for a person from the Tyneside region of the north east of England, or the name of the English-language dialect spoken by its inhabitants...

" shipyard
Shipyard
Shipyards and dockyards are places which repair and build ships. These can be yachts, military vessels, cruise liners or other cargo or passenger ships. Dockyards are sometimes more associated with maintenance and basing activities than shipyards, which are sometimes associated more with initial...

 workers in the 19th century on the Tyne, to describe their Wearside counterparts. The Mackems would "make" the ship to be fitted out by the Geordies, hence "mackem and tackem" ("make them and take them").
Geordie
Geordie
Geordie is a regional nickname for a person from the Tyneside region of the north east of England, or the name of the English-language dialect spoken by its inhabitants...

s along with other people consider the term "mackem" as an insult, perhaps owing to the perceived more skilled role of fitting out the ships compared to the more physical role of assembling the hull. However, without any substantiated use of the phrase prior to the 1970s, this may well be a folk etymology.

Other variants include Sunderland workers who were encouraged to move to Teesside's shipyards for work, where the Teesside-based employers would "mack-em" ("make them") build the ships, or the local brewers Vaux
Vaux Breweries
Vaux Breweries was a major brewer based in Sunderland. It was listed on the London Stock Exchange.-History:The Company was founded by Cuthbert Vaux in Sunderland in 1837 and for nearly 170 years was a major employer in the town....

 who brewed a bottled beer called "Double Maxim". People who drank the beer would ask for a "Mackem" pronouncing the X differently; a person would be called a Mackem who drank the local beer. The term could also be a reference to the volume of ships built during wartime on the River Wear
River Wear
The River Wear is located in North East England, rising in the Pennines and flowing eastwards, mostly through County Durham, to the North Sea at Sunderland.-Geology and history:...

, e.g. "We mackem and they sink em". Alternatively, this phrase may refer to the making and tacking into place of rivets in shipbuilding, which was the main method of assembling ships until the mid-twentieth century.

The term has come to represent people who follow the local Premier League
FA Premier League
The Premier League is an English professional league for association football clubs. At the top of the English football league system, it is the country's primary football competition. Contested by 20 clubs, it operates on a system of promotion and relegation with The Football League. The Premier...

 football
Football (soccer)
Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a sport played between two teams of eleven players with a spherical ball...

 team Sunderland AFC
Sunderland A.F.C.
Sunderland Association Football Club is an English association football club based in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear who currently play in the Premier League...

, and may have been invented for this purpose. Although many Sunderland supporters use this term to describe themselves, the majority of other supporters invented the term as an insult. People from around the outer city areas have also come to be known as Mackems, such as those from Houghton-le-Spring
Houghton-le-Spring
Houghton-le-Spring is part of the City of Sunderland in the county of Tyne and Wear, North East England that has its recorded origins in Norman times. It is situated almost equidistant between the cathedral city of Durham 7 miles to the south-west and the centre of the City of Sunderland about 6...

, Seaham
Seaham
Seaham, formerly Seaham Harbour, is a small town in County Durham, situated south of Sunderland and east of Durham. It has a small parish church, St Mary the Virgin, with a late 7th century Anglo Saxon nave resembling the church at Escomb in many respects. St Mary the Virgin is regarded as one of...

, Boldon and Washington
Washington, Tyne and Wear
Washington is a town in the City of Sunderland in Tyne and Wear, England. Historically part of County Durham, it joined a new county in 1974 with the creation of Tyne and Wear...

. This is mainly due to the use of surrounding areas of Sunderland being used to house population overspill and hence an influx of people from the city.
Newcastle and Sunderland have a history of rivalry beyond the football pitch, dating back to the early stages of the English Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...

, the rivalry following on industrial disputes of the 19th Century and political rivalries after the 1974 creation of Tyne and Wear County.

Accent

Mackem refers to both the people of Sunderland and their accent
Accent (linguistics)
In linguistics, an accent is a manner of pronunciation peculiar to a particular individual, location, or nation.An accent may identify the locality in which its speakers reside , the socio-economic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, their first language In...

.

To people from outside the region the differences between Mackem and Geordie accents often seem marginal, but there are many notable differences. There is even a small but noticeable difference in pronunciation between the accents of North and South Sunderland (for example, the word something in North Sunderland is often contracted to summik whereas a South Sunderland speaker may often prefer summat).

Pronunciation differences and dialect words

  • Make and take are pronounced mak and tak ([ˈmak] and [ˈtak]). This variation is the supposed reason why Tyneside shipyard workers might have coined "Mackem" as an insult. This pronunciation is also used in Scots.

  • Many words ending in -own are pronounced [-ʌun] (cf. Geordie: [-uːn]).

  • School is split into two syllables, with a short [ə] sound added after the oo, separating it from the l: [ˈskʉ.əl]. This is also the case for words ending in -uel or -ool, which are monosyllabic in some other dialects, such as cruel, fuel and fool which in Mackem are [ˈkrʉəl], [ˈfjʉəl] and [ˈfʉəl]. This "extra syllable" occurs in other words spoken in a Mackem dialect, i.e. film is [ˈfɪləm] and poorly [ˈpʉəli]. This feature has led to some words being very differently pronounced in Sunderland. The word face, due to the inclusion of an extra [ə] and the contraction thereof, is often pronounced [ˈfjas]. While [ˈfjas] and some other cases of this extra vowel have been observed in the Geordie dialect, school in that variant is [ˈskjʉːl] versus Mackem's [ˈskʉ.əl] (and [ˈskʉ:l] or [ˈskʉl] in most other dialects). This extra vowel feature is more prevalent to the north, in Scots and Scottish English
    Scottish English
    Scottish English refers to the varieties of English spoken in Scotland. It may or may not be considered distinct from the Scots language. It is always considered distinct from Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic language....

    , where it is due to the influence of the "Gaelic helping vowel" construction in the native Celtic, non-Germanic language Scots Gaelic.

  • The word endings -re and -er are pronounced [ə] as in Standard English, unlike the rhotic
    Rhotic
    In linguistics, rhotic can refer to:* Rhotic consonant, such as the sound in red* R-colored vowel, such as the sound in Midwestern American English pronunciation of fur and before a consonant as in hard....

     Scots variant. Cf. Geordie [æ].

  • Wesh and weshing (for wash and washing) are part of a wider regional dialectical trait which is reminiscent of Old English phonology, where stressed a mutated to e. This can also be observed in other modern Germanic languages
    Germanic languages
    The Germanic languages constitute a sub-branch of the Indo-European language family. The common ancestor of all of the languages in this branch is called Proto-Germanic , which was spoken in approximately the mid-1st millennium BC in Iron Age northern Europe...

    , but it is particularly prevalent in German
    German language
    German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

     and Icelandic
    Icelandic language
    Icelandic is a North Germanic language, the main language of Iceland. Its closest relative is Faroese.Icelandic is an Indo-European language belonging to the North Germanic or Nordic branch of the Germanic languages. Historically, it was the westernmost of the Indo-European languages prior to the...


  • Dinnit (for do not or don't), as in "dinnit punch us".

  • Claes for clothes

  • Wee or whee for who

  • Whey or wey for why: "Whey nar!" ("Why no!")

  • Tee or tae for to in some constructions: "Where yae gawn tee?" ("Where are you going to?")

  • Wuh or wa for we: "Wuh knew wed win" ("We knew we'd win").

  • The dialect word haway or howay means come on. In Newcastle it is often spelled and pronounced howay, while in Sunderland it is almost always haway (or ha'way). The local newspapers in each region use these spellings.

External links

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