The Distinctive Dialect of Ocracoke Island

You’re listening to A Way with Words, this show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Just off the coast of North Carolina lies a long, thin barrier island.

And at that island’s southern end is the tiny village of Ocracoke.

Now, Ocracoke is a charming place.

It’s accessible only by boat or private plane.

And it’s home to one of the most distinctive dialects of American English.

The longtime residents there call themselves hoitoiders.

That’s the local pronunciation of high tide.

And they pronounce the word sound as sand and down as dane and fish as fish.

And especially if you hang out with the older O’Cockers, that’s what the locals call themselves,

You’ll hear some distinctive vocabulary.

The word hammock there, for example, means a small hill, not something that’s swinging between two trees.

And something that’s messed up is said to be momct.

And their distinctive way of speaking is called the brogue.

And if O’Cockers leave the island and they travel abroad,

They’re often mistaken for people from Australia or Ireland.

And the dialect and culture of this isolated area is the subject of a new book by three authors,

Jeffrey Reeser and Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University,

And Cindy Gaskell, who is a fourth-generation resident of Ocracoke.

And the book is called Language and Life on Ocracoke, The Living History of the Brogue.

And it’s a charming volume. It’s really a love letter to the island and its residents.

And the authors say that they wanted to write a linguistics book that you could deem a great

Beach read.

And so to that end, each of their chapters is pretty much self-contained.

It’s almost like a magazine article.

So you can start anywhere in the book and skip around to chapters

With titles like, How is the Brogue Changing?

And that’s a key point, because as the authors put it,

The Brogue is now being washed away with the ever-rising tide of tourism and other changes

Along the Outer Banks.

And those changes have to do with the fact that there are just 900 residents

On the island year round, but in the summertime, you might find 12,000 people there.

And so they’re people who are settling there from other places and bringing their own ways of speaking, whether

They’re snowbirds from the north or native Spanish speakers from Latin America.

And so what I love about this book is that it documents the dialect of Ocracoke at this moment in time, as well as

It’s history because these professors have been going back there for years.

And it’s a vivid, really readable example of how no matter who you are or where you are, your dialect is changing all the time.

It’s not just a static thing.

That sounds like a fantastic read, Martha.

I’ve been tracking the work on that island for a long time.

They’ve been studying there for decades, haven’t they?

They have.

And they’ve been making audio recordings, and that’s one of the other cool things about this book is that you can link to these audio recordings online that illustrate a lot of the points in the book.

Fantastic.

And the book title again is?

Language and Life on Ocracoke, The Living History of the Brogue.

And the authors are?

Jeffrey Reeser, Walt Wolfram, and Cindy Gaskell.

And of course, as always, we’ll link to this book from our website in the episode description at waywordradio.org.

If there’s something you’ve been reading that you think we should tell everyone about, let us know.

Call or text 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.