The Speech of Ocracoke, North Carolina

Bibliographic Data

ID8729666
AuthorsRobert Howren (corresponding author)
Year1962
Volume37
Issue3
Pages163-163
Publication date1962-10-01
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Speech (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1283 • E-ISSN: 1527-2133
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/3090563
OpenAlexW2320565497
LanguageEN
Citations received6

THE OUTER BANKS OF NORTH CAROLINA, a rope of sandbanks flung out from the coast in an irregular, 2oo-mile arc extending from the Virginia border southeast to Cape Hatteras, which lies some twenty-five miles from the nearest point on the mainland, and looping from Hatteras back southwest toward the mainland, have changed in recent generations from the isolated habitat of a hardy fisherfolk to the popular destination of tourists in search of the quaint and picturesque. The relative isolation of the Banks has produced a dialect sufficiently distinct from the speech of the coastal South that every North Carolinian has heard-and many believe-that the Bankers speak 'Elizabethan English' (a dialect related, no doubt, to the form of English popularly supposed to be spoken in the more isolated coves in the mountains at the opposite end of the state). However, the motorcar and the ferryboat-a combination inevitably fatal to quaintness and picturesqueness-have brought perceptible changes to the Outer Banks. A good many linguistic archaisms and localisms perhaps have long since passed from usage, and inevitably further leveling will eventually result from close and continuous contact with the speech of the mainland. One observer noted as early as I91o 'greater changes in the speech of the people [of Hatteras] since the coming of the daily mail in motor boats just ten years ago, than ... in the preceding thirty years, and the songs of the mothers and the grandmothers are well nigh forgotten by the daughters. The aim of this article is to describe in some detail the speech of Ocracoke, one of the oldest of the fifteen or twenty villages scattered up and down the Outer Banks and the latest to succumb to the influences, both good and bad, of tourism. Ocracoke is the sole village (population about 600) on Ocracoke Island, which lies in a northeast-to-southwest position between Hatteras and Portsmouth islands, separated from them by Hatteras Inlet on the northeast and Ocracoke Inlet on the southwest. The small fishing village of Ocracoke is located at the southern end of the island, clustered around Silver Lake, a circular harbor opening into Pamlico Sound. The village originated in 1715, when the North Carolina Assembly passed a bill providing for settling and maintaining pilots at Ocracoke Inlet, which had become an important but dangerous point of entry for shipping. By the end of the colonial period a

Geography · Linguistics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy

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