Posted on 03/11/2025 2:30:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Native Americans, English sailors and pirates all came together on Ocracoke Island in North Carolina to create the only American dialect that is not identified as American.
I'd never been called a "dingbatter" until I went to Ocracoke, North Carolina for the first time. I've spent a good part of my life in the state, but I'm still learning how to speak the Hoi Toider brogue. The people here just have their own way of speaking: it's like someone took Elizabethan English, sprinkled in some Irish tones and 1700s Scottish accents, then mixed it all up with pirate slang. But the Hoi Toider dialect is more than a dialect. It's also a culture, one that's slowly fading away. With each generation, fewer people play meehonkey, cook the traditional foods or know what it is to be "mommucked".
In an effort to put his "America first" stamp on the nation's speech, US President Donald Trump recently signed an executive order making English the country's official language. It marks the first time in the US's nearly 250-year history that the nation has had an official language. Yet, on this small 9.6-square-mile island surrounded by the swirling waters of the Atlantic, residents still speak what is arguably the most English version of English in the country – and many Americans don't understand it.
As the island's official website proudly proclaims: "With origins dating back to the 1600s, Ocracoke brogue is about as American as it gets."
Located 20 miles from the North Carolina mainland, Ocracoke Island is fairly isolated. You can't drive there as there are no bridges, and most people can’t fly either as there are no commercial flights. If you want to go there, it has to be by boat.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
What a great place! I have kinfolk there and have caught about a zillion fish over the years.
My Grandmother from Hickman County Tennessee born in 1906 sill said thee, thou , yee and ye’ll.
We have islands in Maryland where the accents and dialect have remained largely unchanged for hundreds of years - Tangier and Smith.
Probably not for much longer, though - a lot of it is probably changing, now...
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20180206-the-tiny-us-island-with-a-british-accent
Bkmrk
Some of the Delmarva peninsula and Chesapeake Bay islands are like this.
We need to invade these islands and bring them back into the United States!
Thanks for making this point.
I’ve been to Ocracoke many times, both on season and off-season. And I’m here to tell you that this article is very much exaggerated in terms of the local people’s “dialect”.
Locals sound like standard North Carolinas or at least the down east accent that is prevalent through Carteret County and that general area
drunkenese is the spoken language on the island of ocean city maryland...
It’s not just Ocracoke Island, but several areas along the Outer Banks have that accent and word pronunciations...
High tide is “Hoi Toyed” for example..
I was visiting Carl Sandburg’s home in North Carolina yeats ago and heard a woman speaking to her daughter in a language I couldn’t make out. I listened more closely and realized it was some form of English. I thought she might have been speaking some mountain dialect, but maybe she was from Okracoke.
I agree,”use-ta-be” Outer Banks still had a little of that lost island flair in the 60’s, but built up and zillions of us tourists have changed that. I wonder about those further down the barrier chain, beyond the causeways.
Well, Ocean City isn’t an Island. It’s a city on Fenwick Island :-)
(But this time of year, ‘drunkenese’ is spoken in lots of beach towns - often underage drunkenese.)
This reminds me of some people in the Philippines that still speak a form of Castilian Spanish—a holdover from when the Philippines were a colony of Spain for 300 years. My wife’s grandmother spoke it. Spaniards I know tell me it is one of the most beautiful versions of Spanish they have ever heard.
I first visited when the only cable channel you could get on the the Outer Banks was the Weather Channel - back when all it had was maps and music.
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Do they make cheese in Tangier? Maybe that was the inspiration for this:
https://youtu.be/jllhCYvrYgI?si=i7n9fHjV6rDdm8xu
I’ve always been moved by Tom Horton’s book and documentary on Smith Island, ‘An Island Out of Time’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAqM4Y5RIEk
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