Dialect in Danger

Walt Wolfram investigates the case of the disappearing Outer Banks brogue.

As the public argues about the status of well-known dialects such as Southern American English and Ebonics, a unique dialect heritage along the Southeastern coast is quietly eroding. For a couple of centuries, the dialect spoken on the barrier islands and the adjacent coastal mainland of North Carolina has been one of the most distinctive varieties of English in the US.

Small, isolated communities dotting the Outer Banks once nurtured the so-called Outer Banks brogue, a borrowed word from Irish meaning 'twisted tongue'. In the last half century, however, the Outer Banks has been transformed into a tourist mecca now flooded by outsiders, or dingbatters, for up to nine months of the year. In the process, a longstanding, unique dialect of American English has become an
"endangered dialect."

Traits of the Outer Banks Brogue
The most distinguishing traits of the Outer Banks "brogue" are the pronunciation of several vowel sounds, although there are also more subtle differences as well. The pronunciation of long i in words like tide and high, which sounds like the oy vowel of boy or toy to listeners (the actual production is more like the combination of the uh sound of but and the ee sound of beet, so that tide really sounds something like t-uh-ee-d) is the most noticeable trait, and the reason that these speakers are sometimes referred to as hoi toiders. This region is not the only place where this sound is found; it is characteristic of particular regions in the British Isles and in the English of Australia and New Zealand as well. But in the American South, including mainland North Carolina, the pronunciation contrasts sharply with the pronunciation of tahm for time or tahd for tide.

The Outer Banks production of the vowel in brown and mound is also very distinctive. The vowel actually sounds closer to the vowel of brain and mind, and outsiders often confuse words like brown and brain. In fact, when we play the pronunciation of the word brown to listeners from different areas and ask them what word it is, they typically say brain.

Another pronunciation trait, the augh sound in words like caught and bought is produced closer to the vowel sound in words like put or book, a pronunciation that is quite distinctive among the dialects of American English. The pronunciation of this vowel is actually more like its pronunciation in many British dialects of English and one of the reasons that Outer Bankers are sometimes thought to sound British or Austra-lian. As it turns out, North Americans are not the only ones who think that Outer Banks English sounds more like British dialects than it does American dialects. At one point in our study of Outer Banks English, the well-known British dialectologist, Peter Trudgill, visited the Outer Banks to hear the dialect for himself. He took back with him a sample of Outer Banks speech and played it to a group of 15 native speakers of British English in East Anglia. The listeners were unanimous in attributing a British Isles origin to the Outer Banks speech sample; most listeners identified its place of origin in the 'West Country'__that is, south-western England.

Most people focus on the pronunciation of the Outer Banks brogue, but there are also vocabulary and grammatical dialect traits.
Although we have found only a couple of dozen uniquely Outer Banks words out of the thousands of dialect words used in this area, they point to some important differences.

Words like dingbatter, and in some locations dit dot, are widely known terms for outsiders, whereas a term like O'cocker (óh-cock-er) is reserved exclusively for an ancestral islander of Ocracoke--that is, a person whose family genealogy is firmed rooted on the Outer Banks. There are also some meaning nuances of dialect words. The use of the word mommuck, an older English word found in the works of Shakespeare and in some more isolated dialect areas such as Appalachia, has developed a meaning on the Outer Banks that sets it apart from both its original meaning and its current meaning in other regions. In the works of William Shakespeare it is used to refer to 'tearing apart' in a literal sense (e.g., They mommucked the curtain), whereas on the Outer Banks its meaning has been extended to refer to mental or physical harassment (e.g., The young' uns were mommucking me).

Dialect words also reinforce an important point about Outer Banks dialects: it is the combination of the old with the new that defines its current state.

For example, words like mommuck, quamish, meaning 'upset' as in quamished in the gut, and token of death, meaning 'an unusual sign of impending death', such as a rooster crowing in the middle of the day, have been in the English language for centuries. On the other hand, words like dingbatter for 'outsiders', and scud for 'riding around the island' are relatively new. In fact, our research on the term dingbatter shows that it was adopted from the popular 1970s television sitcom All in the Family. In this show, Archie Bunker regularly refers to his wife Edit as a "dingbat" when she displays a lack of common sense. Prior to that time, terms like foreigner and stranger were used for outsiders.

A few grammatical differences also distinguish the dialect. The use of weren't where other dialects use wasn't, as in I weren't there or It weren't in the house is only found in the Mid-Atlantic coastal region, although its use extends from the coastal areas of Virginia and Maryland to the north down to the southern areas of coastal North Carolina. The use of the preposition to for at, as in She's to the house tonight is also fairly limited, though it is also found in some other coastal areas of the mid-Atlantic coastal region.

The use of an -s on verbs in sentences such as The dogs barks every night is characteristic of the Outer Banks brogue, but it is also found in other historically isolated dialects as well, such as those in Appalachia, as is the use of the uh sound with verbs as in
The dogs was a-huntin' the possum.

The grammar of the Outer Banks does not add many unique dialect features to the make-up of the dialect, but it is certainly part of the overall mix that makes Outer Banks English what it is.

The History of the Brogue
Most of the early residents of the Outer Banks came south from Tidewater Virginia and from the eastern shores of Maryland, starting in the first decades of the 1700s. The early migration south along the coast was by boat, as the complicated network of rivers, estuaries and inlets, and the expansive marshlands made overland travel impossible. Although residents of the tidewater area did not come from a single location in the British Isles, southwestern England was well represented in the early population, al-though there were also people from East Anglia and other areas as well, including some Scots Irish. Some dialect traits can be traced to prominent features of Southwest-ern English, but there are also some features that can be traced to Irish English that make Outer Banks English similar to the dialects of Appalachia, where the Scots-Irish English
effect is well-established.

The dialect resulted from a selective molding of various traits from the British Isles that took on a regional dimension along the coastal areas and islands of the Mid-Atlantic, concentrated in the islands running from the Chesapeake Bay to the Outer Banks. Although we can only speculate about the time of its emergence, the examination of some of the written documents, including the logs kept by lighthouse pilots, letters, and memoirs, shows that the dialect was well in place by the early and mid-1800s and flourished well into the mid-twentieth
century.

The Future of the Brogue
What will happen to the brogue as the Outer Banks is flooded by the ever-increasing wave of dingbatters who transformed the barrier isl-ands from a self-contained, marine-based economy into a service-based tourist industry during the past half century? The classification of the brogue as an "endangered dialect" has sometimes caught the fancy of the media, but the threat to the brogue in communities up and down coastal Carolina is very real. If we compare just three generations within the same family, we can see how quickly a unique language can die. In some families, the grandparents may still retain many traditional speech characteristics of the dialect, including the traditional pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar; the children, however, show a significant reduction in the use of the forms, and the grandchildren have virtually none of these traits. We have documented this pattern of dialect erosion in a number of families we have interviewed over the past decade, so that the traditional dialect could, in fact, vanish in a couple of generations.

Dialectologists and linguists worry about the disappearance of the brogue, and liken language loss to the extinction of biological species, arguing that science, culture, and history are lost when a language or dialect of a language dies. In our quest to understand the general nature of language, we learn from diversity, just as we learn about the general nature of life from biological diversity. When a language or dialect dies, there is an essential and unique part of a human knowledge and culture that dies with it. The Outer Banks would certainly still be the Outer Banks if the dialect were to disappear completely, but a part of the traditional culture of the island surely would be lost if it does. I personally find it hard to imagine certain stories being told without the resonating sounds of the brogue.

One thing seems to be certain about the brogue. It has been an essential part of the traditional Outer Banks culture and people in the community and students in the schools need to know about it if they have any desire of staying in touch with the legacy that has made the Outer Banks such a unique place. The dialect heritage deserves to be indelibly documented and preserved-for hoi toiders, for new residents, and for tourists who wish to understand why it is such a special place. To this end, our activities on the Outer Banks have involved recorded interviews with islanders of all ages, producing video documentaries and audio compact disks and cassettes that preserve the brogue, and developing a school-based curriculum for students to learn about their dialect heritage.

Resources
A popular description of Ocracoke speech is found in Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue (University of North Carolina Press, 1997, $14.95); a more technical description is provided in Walt Wolfram, Kirk Hazen, and Natalie Schilling-Estes, Dialect Change and Main-tenance on the Outer Banks (Publication of the American Dialect Number 81, Duke University Press, 1999, $20). A video, The Ocracoke Brogue, can be purchased for $20 from the Ocracoke Preservation Society (http://www.ocracoke-museum.org) and a
CD/cassette, Ocracoke Speaks, which gives the stories of Ocracoke in the voice of the residents themselves, can be purchased for $15. Speech samples can also be found on the web at http://www.ncsu.edu/linguistics and http://www.ocracoke-museum.org