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.
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
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.
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.
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The way the locals say “Eff off and leave!” is pretty endearing...
My first paternal ancestor in America, Bartholomew Weathersbee, immigrated from England in 1616 landing at Elizabeth City, NC. I imagine that his English sounded much like the people of this island. The surname is now spelled Weathersby.
Snot dat differnt fum Merlin. Dey say dur ayohs th’same way we dew.
Interesting. I don’t know much about the place, just that my father trained there during WWII.
That is so cool. A connection to the past.
Like parts of SW Louisiana where they speak a language made up of Cajun French and English.
Sounds like the north central main dialects from 50 years ago
Now Floridian accents are Southern New York.