in Wilmington. They came from 

 Virginia and South Carolina, 

 especially; Charleston, particularly. 



SPIDER 



frying skillet with legs 



"It was a port,, and it was 

 cosmopolitan, always has been," 

 says Wilmington native Claude 

 Howe, 77. 



Because the population varied 

 so, and people constantly moved in 

 and out, a strong dialect never had 

 time to develop, some historians 

 speculate. 



Or it may be because Wil- 

 mington, first known as New 

 Carthage, was settled so much later 

 than other parts of the coast, Warren 

 says. By the time people arrived at 

 the port city, they had lost their 

 strong verbal connection to the 

 Mother Country or their homeland. 



A clear connection lingers, 

 though, between Wilmington and 

 southeast Virginia and northeast 

 South Carolina. 



Most colonial trade from 

 Wilmington was between large 

 coastal cities, Howe says. People 

 traveled the same routes, too. Today, 

 the subtle dialect has more flavor of 

 Charleston than that of northeastern 

 North Carolina or the Piedmont. 



Retired Southport riverboat pilot 



Robert Thompson characterizes 

 what he hears in Wilmington as 

 "dry and flat." Someone else might 

 call it "refined." 



Howe's mother, from southern 

 Virginia, added a "y" in words 

 such as "gyarden" and "cyanal," 

 which can still be heard spoken by 

 older Wilmington natives. She said 

 "house," as in "host," instead of 

 "howse," as well, Howe says. 



FALLING 

 TO A WHISPER 



All along the Eastern Seaboard 

 and into the Deep South, similari- 

 ties and differences in dialects can 

 be heard. But like a shout falling to 

 a whisper, many of the old words 

 and pronunciations are fading. 



Change — World War IT, the 

 road from Kitty Hawk to Nags Head 

 built in 1932, the bridge from 

 Harkers Island to the mainland in 

 1941 , and tourism — began the 

 slow erosion of the speech once 

 isolated by water on almost every 

 side. Recently, radio and television 

 may have had some effect. 



But, says Wolfram, "television 

 doesn't make nearly the inroad that 

 it's given credit or blame for. We 

 get our language from the folks we 

 interact with. We don't want to talk 

 like people on television unless we 

 want to pick up some cool words. 

 We really want to talk like the 

 people we hang out with." 



To help preserve the Ocockers' 

 speech, he plans to contribute his 

 research tapes to an island library, 

 write a general-interest book on the 

 dialect and teach a course on it at 

 the Ocracoke School next spring. 



Other projects are under way 

 to record the vocabulary and 

 speech of communities such as 

 Harkers Island and Morehead City. 



"It's at least very important, I 



believe, to recognize the people 

 who speak that way and realize 

 they will be no more in a few 

 years," says Alton Ballance, author 

 of Ocracokers and a native of the 

 island. "That person's voice, if it 

 doesn't get recorded, will never be 

 heard again." 



But the dialects of North 

 Carolina's coastal communities 

 will survive, in person, on paper or 

 on tape, Dough writes. 



"The speech of the Banks is a 

 dynamic, thriving organism," he 

 writes. "No matter how much of it 

 is retained, no matter how many 

 new terms are created locally or 

 brought in by newcomers, the 

 dialect ... will remain distinctive, 

 for the Bankers — an independent, 

 indomitable crew — will remain 

 distinctive in the face of develop- 

 ment just as they have done in the 

 face of displacement, occupation 

 and natural disaster for over three 

 centuries." 



COASTWATCH 17 



