Posted on 03/11/2025 2:30:37 PM PDT by nickcarraway
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.
.
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
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.