0^ CZ) S ' _L 1 L 3 I E/ C[Z ' X ' S . 



By Sarah Friday Peters 



Spend any time around Harkers 

 Island, Ocracoke or the other nooks 

 and crannies of North Carolina's 

 coast, and you're likely to hear 

 something akin to a foreign language. 



Take the words of a young 

 fisherman from Cedar Island. 



"Oi loike to catch them Ion thans 

 that look loike snakes — eels, yeah," 

 the 6-year-old boy said. "Meeny 

 toimes" that summer, he'd brought 

 them home to his mother's fry-pan. 

 "It'd have a 'hole mess of eels in it, 

 and she chopped' em in half and we 

 eat'em." 



"Did they taste good?" someone 

 asked. 



"Noit to me they didn't," the boy 

 said. "Taists like snake." 



JELLYWHOPPER 

 something large 



Not only do the words sound 

 funny — a sharp detour from the 

 genteel, rolling drawl of the South — 

 but the vocabulary itself takes a curve 

 down a road less traveled by most 

 North Carolinians. 



Words like "begaumed," 



"benambered," "wadjit" and 

 "jellywhopper" color coastal speech 

 from Duck to Wilmington and leave 

 visitors intrigued as to the mysteries 

 of their origins. 



Some natives say the dialects 

 survive from the time of Queen 

 Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh. 

 Others say shipwrecks left English 

 ancestors stranded on the beaches. 

 The Lost Colony itself may mark the 

 beginnings of the tongue, some 

 believe. More likely, though, the 

 dialects are a mix of foreign and 

 regional speech patterns that have 

 threaded together over time. 



No one knows for sure how 

 many dialects can be heard along 

 North Carolina's coast. But since a 

 dialect is made up of certain sounds 

 and words spoken by one group or in 

 one place, each community could 

 feasibly have its own. 



The state's coastal towns were 

 settled at different times in different 

 ways, says Wynne Dough, curator of 

 the Outer Banks History Center and a 

 native of Roanoke Island. Differing 

 settlement patterns affected the way 

 the people of Manteo, Hatteras and 

 other communities lived. And it 

 influenced their speech. 



Today, the brogues of Ocracoke 

 and Harkers Island — often called 

 "Hoigh Toide" — sound the most 

 intense. But the dialects of Hatteras, 

 Cedar Island, Salter Path and other 

 sites along the Outer Banks carry 

 their own blend of spoken signatures. 

 Only a stretch of coastline near 

 Wilmington lacks well-defined 

 patterns of speech. 



The way the "Ocockers" 

 (Ah-cockers) of Ocracoke, the 

 "Ca'e" (Kay) Bankers of Cape 

 Lookout and other coastal natives 



speak today can be traced to the 

 beginnings of European settlement 

 some 300 years ago. People came to 

 the Carolina coast first by way of the 

 Albemarle region in the mid- 1600s. 

 Then they sailed into Ocracoke, Cape 

 Lookout, Wilmington and other 

 points south during the next 100 

 years. 



SOUSE 



to wet down 



Where these 17th- and 18th- 

 century pioneers settled, their dialects 

 followed. And American English 

 began to take shape. 



English settlers influenced the 

 speech of the Carolina coast the most. 

 Yet marked differences arose from 

 Wilmington south. In the Piedmont, 

 where Scotch-Irish and Scottish 

 Highlanders moved in, other lan- 

 guage lines were drawn. And to the 

 west, Scotch-Irish and German 

 settlers brought a different tongue. 



It was isolation, coupled with a 

 slow rate of change, that kept hints of 

 the Old World speech alive at the 

 coast. 



12 SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 1993 



