Listen to representative voices from specific regions and guess where the speaker lives. Each audio clip tells a story of our state’s unique language tradition and conveys a sense of how dialects dynamically transmit the rich history and culture of our state.
Along with natural beauty and resources, North Carolina is blessed with a host of unique dialects. Someone who grew up on, say, Ocracoke Island, is gonna talk a lot different than some from, say, the far reaches of western N.C. Heck, someone from Ocracoke is gonna speak different from someone from Wilmington, and those two locations are not far from each other at all.One of the well-known differences between British English and American English is the different terms for the primary storage area of a car. In America, it’s called a trunk and in England it’s a boot. Travelers to the Coastal Plain of North Carolina, however, may be surprised to find that rural residents in these areas also refer to it as a boot. From counties such as Bertie and Martin in the northern Coastal Plain to Brunswick and New Brunswick in the south, older residents may use the term boot to refer to what most Americans call a trunk. The residents did not travel to England to pick up the term; it’s simply an older form in English that was used to refer to the luggage compartment that often sat under the seat by the boots of the driver in horse-and-buggy times. Given the history of small, isolated rural communities in North Carolina, it stands to reason that it is a state that retains is fair share of “relic” dialect terms.
The other local news is that Ocracoke’s oldest resident, Mrs. Belle Bryant, has just passed away. An African American woman, born in the year the Wright brothers launched their plane at Kitty Hawk, she lived her entire life on Ocracoke and died at the age of one hundred and four. She remembered her grandmother as a slave in the Antebellum South. There are no African Americans living on the island now. A number of mexicans have recently moved in as a new minority to work in the modest island construction industry. Such is the odd human balance that currently exists in the Republic of Ocracoke!
Everyone on Ocracoke has a voice that is heard. We resist change until a clear consensus is apparent. The microphone gets turned up a notch for people who have lived here the longest, and even further for those with deep roots on the island. Yet native Ocracokers often are overlooked and misunderstood.
This page is intended to be a resource to enhance civic involvement. We want to increase understanding of the mission and scope of the many organizations, committees, boards, non-profits and government entities that make things happen on Ocracoke.
If you’ve read this far, congratulations! OcracokeCurrent encourages you to check out the links, see what raises your blood pressure or makes your heart beat faster, and contact the people involved.
Democracy is not available to everyone, and we are lucky enough to have it, here on the republic of Ocracoke.
There's a gradual shift toward a less distinctive regional accent, and our vowel sounds are leading the way, says the News & Observer.
"Language is always changing, always in flux," said Robin Dodsworth, an associate linguistics professor at N.C. State University. "Over time in Raleigh, the Southern variant is disappearing."
Apparently, this is a story about the South in general, not just Raleigh. I don't believe it.Walt Wolfram, NCSU's William C. Friday distinguished professor of English linguistics, says the South isn't losing its identity in terms of speech - it's reconfiguring. The South, particularly in urban areas, has transformed itself during the past 30 years, Wolfram said. Cities have been more influenced by outsiders, and this vowel shift is partially a product of that change. And it's more subtle than natives might realize.
"If a Southern person goes north, people are still going to say you sound Southern," Wolfram said.
A book I highly recommend to those interested in North Carolina culture and linguistics is Walt Wolfram's "Hoi toide on the Outer Banks," which does a marvelous job of studying the Ocracoke brogue.
