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K–12 teaching and learning · from the UNC School of Education

Outer Banks English

About this video

Director
Neal Hutcheson
Provider
North Carolina State University / North Carolina Language and Life Project
Date created
2005
Duration
5:23
Location
North Carolina
File
Flash Video
License
This video copyright ©2008. All Rights Reserved

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  • Outer Banks English: In this lesson plan, students view a video about the dialect of North Carolina's Outer Banks and develop an understanding of linguistic patterns.

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An excerpt about the dialect of the North Carolina Outer Banks from the documentary Voices of North Carolina, produced by Neal Hutcheson and the North Carolina Language and Life Project.

This video is one in a series that also includes:

Transcript

(00:14)
Hoi toid?  What is it?  It’s hoi toid. High tide.  It’s where the tide comes up high on the sound side.  Sound, like Pamlico Sound.  Hoi toid on the sound side. 
(00:30)
The remote fishing communities along North Carolina’s coast inherited the brogue from their English and Irish forebears. Over the years, they also added many new words and pronunciations to the dialect.
(00:52)
I know my uncle used to always say, picking on me all the time, you know, when I was young, and we’d be fishing, you know, and he’d say, "Come on, let’s get going, hoi toid on the sound side, last night the water ** like moonshine no fish, we’d pull them out of the **. Get her going!"
James Barrie Gaskill (01:12)
This here’s old ** even been a couple days, so this pot here brought to my friend Vincent and he like get, mines ** crab ** day and won’t be much in them.*
David Hill (01:24)
A lot of times, out of Raleigh and stuff, I mean I’ll go up, talk to people, they’ll say, well, "You got an Australian accent." I’m like, "No I don’t." You know, I got a down east, high tide accent.
Cheryl Macintosh (01:33)
Like I told my speech teacher, I don’t have a Southern drawl, I got a high tide brogue, you know. He said, "What is a high tide brogue?" And I said, "You know, it’s where we live. It’s called the high tide brogue."
(01:50)
High tiders, yeah, I’d forgot about that one.
Cheryl Macintosh (01:55)
We want to talk the way we do, in order to talk the way we talk, you really have had to have grown up here.
Mark Lester (02:09)
If you’re born and raised around it, everybody’s, you know, you just, it’s normal to you, it’s just like anything, you know? If you’re born Japanese, you talk Japanese, you know what I mean?
(02:23)
"What kind, what accent is that," alot of people look at me and say, "What are you, is that an Irish English accent." And then somebody, the two, three of them together, and then he’ll look at the other guy, and say, "Yeah, I think it’s more Irish-English than English-Irish." Or something, you know, like and then, because I talk funny, a lot of people will say, "Well, how long have you been down here on the Outer Banks anyway?" You know?
(02:43)
They ask me where I was from, they thought I was from overseas somewheres, and they didn’t think, wanted to know if I was American. I said, "Yeah." So they said, "You talk funny," says, "You don’t talk like we do." Well they didn’t talk like I did either.
Donna Minnelli (02:58)
Yeah, people make fun of us, yeah, we hear people make fun of us. But that’s alright, because we think they talk different too, so.
(03:07)
You get made fun of wherever you go.
(03:11)
This is true.
(03:11)
If they didn’t like you, they wouldn’t talk to you, would they, Jim?
Nat Jackson (03:14)
I guess we should be very proud of it. It’s nothing to — it’s what you’re born with, and you carry it with you all your life.
(03:30)
[Singing]
(04:03)
… Pull that part up, and we’ll flip it over, and we’ll let all the bait out, and then we’ll pull the top out, and shake the crabs in there, and then we’ll reach down to get bait, fish bait to put back in there, and you know, just throw it right back, I mean, that’s all it is. About 250 times a day.
(04:46)
The way we sound, I don’t care about changing. I don’t think you could teach me over again.
(04:55)
I wouldn’t be able to understand it otherwise.
(04:59)
Dialect reaches right on down, I don’t think there will ever be a time in which there won’t be some of it, here. So, you got to, you got a job to get it out of something that’s sunk in so deep. I can’t help that, but that’s the way it is. I’m proud of it today. I wouldn’t take nothing in the world for it.