Mackem

Mackem is a term that refers to the residents of Sunderland, dialect and people of the Wearside area, or more specifically Sunderland, a city in North East England. Spelling variations include "Mak'em", "Makem", and "Maccam".

Origin

Evidence suggests the term is a recent coinage. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 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" shipyard 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"). Geordies 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 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.^{[citation needed]} The term could also be a reference to the volume of ships built during wartime on the River Wear, e.g. "We mackem and they sink em".^{[citation needed]} 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.^{[citation needed]}

The term has come to represent people who follow the local Premier League football team Sunderland AFC, 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, Seaham, Boldon and Washington. 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, 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.

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 [ˈskʉːl] or [ˈskʉl] in most other dialects). This extra vowel feature is more prevalent to the north, in Scots and Scottish English, 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 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, but it is particularly prevalent in German and Icelandic

• 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 latter spelling is prominent in Sunderland A.F.C.'s slogan, "Ha'way The Lads"). The local newspapers in each region use these spellings.

External links

• Mackems Virtual Sunderland
• Wear Online - Home of the Mackem Dictionary