Talkin' Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina

By Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser

Are you considered a "dingbatter," or outsider, when you visit the Outer Banks?
Have you ever noticed a picture in your house hanging a little "sigogglin," or crooked?
Do you enjoy spending time with your "buddyrow," or close friend?

Drawing on over two decades of research and 3,000 recorded interviews from every corner of the state, Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser's lively book introduces readers to the unique regional, social, and ethnic dialects of North Carolina, as well as its major languages, including American Indian languages and Spanish. Considering how we speak as a reflection of our past and present, Wolfram and Reaser show how languages and dialects are a fascinating way to understand our state's rich and diverse cultural heritage. The book is enhanced by maps and illustrations and augmented by more than 100 audio and video recordings, which can be found online at talkintarheel.com.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Apr 7, 2014
• ISBN: 9781469614373

Walt Wolfram

Walt Wolfram is William C. Friday Distinguished Professor of English at North Carolina State University and author of Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue, among other books.

Book preview

Talkin’ Tar Heel

Talkin’ Tar Heel

How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina

Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Blythe Family Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2014 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America.

Designed and set in Quadraat types by Sally Scruggs. The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wolfram, Walt, 1941–

Talkin’ tar heel : how our voices tell the story of North Carolina /

Walt Wolfram, Jeffrey Reaser.

pages cm

The book is enhanced by maps and illustrations and augmented by more than 100 audio and video recordings, which can be found online at talkintarheel.com.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-1436-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-4696-1437-3 (ebook)

1. English language—Dialects—North Carolina. 2. English language—Dialects—North Carolina—Electronic information resources. 3. English language—North Carolina. 4. Americanisms—North Carolina. 5. North Carolina—Languages. I. Reaser, Jeffrey Leo, 1976–II. Title.

PE3101.N76W65 2014

427’.9756—dc23

2013041124

18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. Tar Heels in North Cackalacky

2. The Origins of Language Diversity in North Carolina

3. Landscaping Dialect: From Manteo to Murphy

4. Talkin’ Country and City

5. The Outer Banks Brogue

6. Mountain Talk

7. African American Speech in North Carolina

8. The Legacy of American Indian Languages

9. Lumbee English: Tar Heel American Indian Dialect

10. Carolina del Norte: Latino Tar Heels

11. Celebrating Language Diversity

Notes

Index of Dialect Words and Phrases

Index of Subjects

Preface

Linguists usually write books about particular languages or dialects, not about language diversity within a political state. But there are also few states that showcase regional, ethnic, and social diversity of language more stylishly than the Tar Heel State. In many respects, North Carolina is a microcosm of the vast range of language differences that have developed over time and space in the United States. After more than two decades of interviewing and recording thousands of residents and shooting hundreds of hours of video footage, we feel that we would be remiss if we did not share the rich assortment of North Carolina voices with a broader audience.

Under the rubric of the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP), we have undertaken the challenge of describing the dialects and languages of North Carolina. The NCLLP is a unique, language-based program at North Carolina State University that focuses on research and outreach programs related to language in North Carolina. Its goals are: (1) to gather basic research information about language varieties in order to understand the nature of language variation and change; (2) to document language varieties in North Carolina and beyond as they reflect the varied cultural traditions of their residents; (3) to provide information about language differences for public and educational interests; and (4) to use research material for the improvement of educational programs about language and culture.

Since the NCLLP’s inception in 1993, its staff has been conducting sociolinguistic interviews with residents in North Carolina that connect language, culture, and history. Discussions typically cover a wide range of topics, from history and remembrances to current livelihood and lifestyle changes. All of the interviews are archived on a website hosted by the library at North Carolina State University, the Sociolinguistic Archive and Analysis Project (http://ncslaap.lib.ncsu.edu). This interactive, Web-based archive of sociolinguistic recordings integrates with annotation features and technical analysis tools. It is an ongoing, constantly growing archive that contains (as of September 2013) over 6,000 audio files, 3,200 hours of audio, 100 hours of transcribed audio, and more than 1 million words accurately linked to the audio. We are serious about preserving the voices of Tar Heel speech in the digital age.

The NCLLP is a major research program, but it is more than that. Following the adage if knowledge is worth having, then it is worth sharing, we have been engaged in a number of community-based language and dialect projects that focus on regional, social, and ethnic varieties of southern English, attempting to represent the major dialect areas of North Carolina as well as the urban-rural dimension of dialect patterning. Extensive, community-based studies have taken place in more than twenty-five different community sites spanning literally from Murphy to Manteo. We initially focused on more remote, rural areas, but our colleagues have more recently undertaken studies of urban areas so that we can understand the current rapidly expanding metropolitan context of North Carolina. We have studied ethnic and social dimensions of language differences that include African American varieties of English, American Indian languages and varieties of American Indian English, and emerging ethnic varieties of English spoken by Latinos in rural and metropolitan areas.

In addition to its sociolinguistic research commitment, the NCLLP engages in a full array of public-outreach programs related to language diversity. These activities have led to the production of a series of television documentaries that range from a general profile of language variation throughout North Carolina (Voices of North Carolina, 2005) to documentaries on particular dialects, such as Outer Banks English (The Ocracoke Brogue, 1996; The Carolina Brogue, 2009), Southern Highland speech in western North Carolina (Mountain Talk, 2004), Lumbee English (Indian by Birth: The Lumbee Dialect, 2001), and languages (Spanish Voices, 2011), with more in progress. The staff of the NCLLP has further produced a number of oral history CD collections and published trade books on particular varieties of English, such as Lumbee English and Outer Banks English. They have also constructed exhibits on dialects at museums and cultural centers in partnership with local communities as well as at the State Fair in Raleigh. A dialect-awareness curriculum for middle school students has been developed throughout the state (Voices of North Carolina: From the Atlantic to Appalachia, 2007), and staff members routinely give presentations and conduct workshops on language diversity in the public schools and at local civic organizations, including preservation and historical societies.

The simple goal of this book is to share knowledge and respect for the heritage of languages and dialects in North Carolina in a readable, audible, and visual format accessible to the general reader. We try to avoid linguistic jargon, but when it is necessary to use technical terms, we define them in a way that our nonlinguist friends and family can understand. We also employ a convention used in our field where dialect words and structures are written in italics to separate them from the rest of the sentence. Most of the time, these are followed immediately by definitions or translations, which appear in parentheses and quotation marks to keep them separate. We also include more than 125 audio and video enhancements from our rich archive of audio and video footage as well as other resources to allow the voices and people to speak for themselves. Though the extensive integration of audio and visual enhancements throughout the text is somewhat novel in the field of linguistics, the inclusion of the clips seems as natural as language diversity itself. We want the general reader to experience language and dialect rather than imagine it, and experiencing the enhancements is easy. Each enhancement has a brief description so that the reader knows what he or she might hear or see. All the reader has to do is navigate any Web browser to the provided URL or use a smartphone or any device with a QR reader to snap a picture of the QR code to access the media directly. In the enhanced e-reader version of the book, these enhancements are embedded in the text itself.

From the onset of this project, Walt Wolfram’s goal was to have my wife, Marge, read this book, listen to the audios, and see the people for herself. Marge, an avid reader, is a nonlinguist who finds linguistic books boring. At the same time, Marge, like most people, finds language differences curious and captivating in her everyday interactions with people. Our challenge, then, has been to capture and present the inherent language intrigue that language differences hold for the general public. We hope that our appreciation of and respect for the language traditions of the Tar Heel State will resonate distinctively in the voices of the North Carolinians represented here.

Acknowledgments

No project of this magnitude is possible without a community. In fact, one of the greatest attributes of the staff of North Carolina Language and Life Project is the collaborative spirit and teamwork. For a couple of decades, we have had an outstanding collective of faculty, students, and other professional partners. We complement and support each other, work hard, and have lots of fun in the process. We even eat well—if not healthfully—from the limitless snacks that fill one of the cabinets in the Linguistics Lab. We hope that the presentation of language in this book is representative of our joyful spirit and the pride we take in portraying the language legacy of the Tar Heel State.

The description of language in Talkin’ Tar Heel comes from the efforts of our linguistic colleagues, our student researchers, and, perhaps most of all, the many community participants who shared their lives and language with us over the years. North Carolina State University faculty colleagues Drs. Erik R. Thomas, Robin M. Dodsworth, Agnes Bolonyai, and Jeff Mielke have conducted many research projects that we rely on in our descriptions, and colleagues such as Dr. Connie C. Eble from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Drs. Boyd Davis and Rebecca Roeder from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte contributed greatly to our understanding of North Carolina speech. Professors Eble and Davis read an earlier draft of the manuscript and provided invaluable comments and guidance. Dr. Jeffrey (Jeff) Crow, the former deputy secretary of Archives and History for the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and a respected historian of North Carolina, graciously read the chapter on history and made helpful suggestions about the historical context of North Carolina language and dialect development; Dr. Kirk Hazen of West Virginia University read and made useful comments on an early version of chapter 4 on urban and rural dialect differences; Dr. Bridget Anderson of Old Dominion University made useful suggestions on chapter 6 on Mountain Talk and graciously provided photographs for that chapter as well; Dr. Hartwell Francis, director of the Western Carolina University Cherokee Language Program and Dr. Ives Goddard, curator emeritus in the Department of Anthropology of the Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution, offered useful feedback on chapter 8 regarding American Indian languages in North Carolina; and Dr. Phillip Carter of Florida International University and Dr. Mary E. Kohn of Kansas State University provided beneficial comments and feedback on chapter 10 related to Spanish and Hispanicized English. Despite the generous amount of help from so many colleagues, we are certain there remain shortcomings in the text, for which we take full responsibility.

Graduate-student contributors to our research and engagement over the years are too numerous to name, but a dedicated group of students worked directly and extensively on the project. Jaclyn Daugherty and Martha Summerlin spent a couple of semesters extracting and compiling audio and video materials for the book’s enhancements. Joel Schneier became our skilled in-house cartographer, Web master, and counsel on many technical and substantive aspects of presentation, and Meghan Deanna Cooper took the lead in copyright permissions, proofing, formatting, and related editing tasks as intern editor on the project. Caroline Myrick completed the audio and visual collections, recording additional samples and integrating them into the text. She also read and commented on the entire text and provided many of the captions for our enhancements and figures. Furthermore, she was instrumental in organizing and selecting many of the photographs. Instead of listing her additional contributions, we simply note that we can’t recall any part of the process that she didn’t work on. Without the commitment of these remarkable student colleagues who dedicated their summer to our mission, we would not have completed the book and audio and video enhancements on schedule. As usual, our students were the best!

Videographers Danica Cullinan and Neal Hutcheson, whose documentary productions have greatly enriched the understanding of language and life in North Carolina, helped organize and compile the audios and videos selected for the enhancements and produced some clips just for the book. They also are responsible for collecting the vast majority of the original video footage that we have used from archives of the North Carolina Language and Life Project. Without the collection of this footage over the last fifteen years, this project would have been limited to the traditional parameters of a book. Neal and Danica’s creative vision and tireless work have demonstrated that culture is best understood when presented by local voices and framed by indigenous vistas, fauna, music, and sounds.

It has been a privilege to work with the staff at the University of North Carolina Press, extending from early conversations about the book’s feasibility with former editorial director David Perry to the completion of the project under current editorial director Mark Simpson-Vos. Manuscript editor Jay Mazzocchi was accessible and helpful as we finalized the manuscript, and our consultations with Dino Battista, Caitlin Bell-Butterfield, Tom Elrod, and Elaine Maisner were always productive and instructive. We thank them for their attentiveness to our goals and for all they have done to transform our vision into a final product that eclipsed the one we imagined.

Throughout our professional lives, our spouses, Marge and Emily, respectively, and our families have demonstrated unwavering yet patient support for our preoccupation with the research and projects resulting in this book. Authors are routinely expected to thank patient partners in their books, but our indebtedness goes far beyond formulaic gratitude. Coming home at the end of the day to our families has always been the most important and meaningful part of our lives.

Finally, we would like to dedicate this effort to the late Dr. William C. (Bill) Friday, one of the most remarkable North Carolinians in the history of the state. Few people will be remembered with such universal respect and fondness. From the initial meeting in his office more than two decades ago—when Walt Wolfram inadvertently gave him a book he had inscribed for Marge with the greeting Dear Sweetie—to the last conversation on the telephone about the value of preserving languages and dialects in North Carolina as we were completing this manuscript, we experienced Dr. Friday’s gracious encouragement and support. His principled loyalty to and love for things North Carolinian, including its language heritage, is without parallel, and he will be treasured forever.

Talkin’ Tar Heel

1. Tar Heels in North Cackalacky

I think North Carolina has a level of cultural and historical resources that are unsurpassed nationally. We are known and envied across the country. —LINDA CARLISLE, secretary of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, quoted in the Raleigh News and Observer, December 9, 2011

From Manteo to Murphy (or from Murphy to Manteo) is a common expression used throughout North Carolina. The idiom spans 475 miles (544 driving miles)—from the Intracoastal Waterway community of Manteo (population 1,500) on Roanoke Island, located at the site of the first English settlement in North America, to the southwestern border town of Murphy (population 1,700), nestled in the Smoky Mountains. The physical geography extends from the most expansive coastal estuary on the East Coast of the United States to the lush, rock-garden vegetation of the Smoky Mountains. But Manteo to Murphy refers to much more than distance and topography. History, tradition, arts, food, and sports also define the cultural landscape.

North Carolinians like their state a lot, and so do the 50 million yearly visitors. We are surprised by how many people we encounter who decided to move to North Carolina without any previous connection to the state—and even without a destination job—simply because it seemed like a good place to live. North Carolina is not shy about marketing its resources as one of the top states for both living and vacationing. There is, however, one notable characteristic that rarely makes it into advertisements about its cultural and historical resources: its language and dialect heritage. Language reflects where people come from, how they have developed, and how they identify themselves regionally and socially. In some respects, language is simply another artifact of history and culture, but language variation is unlike other cultural and historical landmarks. We don’t need to visit a historical monument, go to an exhibit, view an artist’s gallery, or attend an athletic event to witness it firsthand; language resonates in the sounds of ordinary speakers in everyday conversation. Other landmarks recount the past; language simultaneously indexes the past, present, and future of the state and its residents. The voices of North Carolinians reflect the diversity of its people. They came to this region in different eras from different places under varied conditions and established diverse communities based on the natural resources of the land and waterways. The range of settlers extends from the first American Indians who arrived here at least a couple of thousand years ago from other regions in North America to the most recent Latino immigrants from Central and South America in the late twentieth century. The diverse origins and the migratory routes that brought people to North Carolina have led to a diffuse, multilayered cultural and linguistic panorama that continues to evolve along with the ever-changing profiles of its people.

Dialects and Legacy

When Walt Wolfram first moved to North Carolina in 1992, he often described his midlife passage as dying and going to dialect heaven. Since then, he and the staff of the North Carolina Language and Life Project (NCLLP) have conducted several thousand interviews with residents of the state—literally from Manteo to Murphy—which have only reaffirmed his observation (though his colleagues may have tired of hearing his heavenly proclamation). So why is North Carolina so linguistically intriguing? And why has this richness not been celebrated in the same way as other cultural and historical treasures of the Tar Heel State?

The conditions for dialect and language diversity are tied closely to physical geography and the human ecology of the region that eventually became known as North Carolina. From the eastern estuaries along the Atlantic Ocean, the terrain transitions into the Coastal Plain, the Piedmont, and the mountains of southern Appalachia—from sand to rich loam, to red clay, to mixed rock and dirt. The varied soils and climates contribute to diverse vegetation, wildlife, natural resources, and cultural economies. Waves of migration at different periods originating from different locations here and abroad have helped establish communities in both convenient and out-of-the-way areas that still reveal a distinct founder effect in language even centuries after settlement. (Founder effect is the term linguists use for a lasting influence from the language variety of the first dominant group of speakers to occupy an area.) So, the western mountains of North Carolina still bear the imprint of Scots-Irish English, brought by the many settlers who came from their homeland to Philadelphia before traveling west and south on the Great Wagon Road in the early 1800s.¹ For example, the use of anymore in affirmative sentences such as We watch a lot of videos anymore, the use of you’uns for plural you in You’uns can tell some Jack Tales, and the use of whenever to refer to at the time that as in Whenever I was young I would do that can all be attributed to the lasting influence of linguistic traits originally brought by the Scots-Irish. In fact, the current use of anymore in positive sentences follows the migration route from Philadelphia through western Pennsylvania and down the Great Wagon Road, diffusing outward from this path as travelers set up communities along the way.

Similarly, the coastal region and the Outer Banks still echo the dialect influence of those who journeyed south by water from the coastal areas of Virginia. Dialect features like the use of weren’t in I weren’t there, the pronunciation of high tide as hoi toid, and the pronunciation of brown more like brane or brain are shared along this and adjoining estuaries. The interconnected waterways and the settlement history help explain why speakers from North Carolina Outer Banks communities, such as Ocracoke and Harkers Island, sound much more like the speakers of Virginia’s Tangier Island and Maryland’s Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay than they do the speakers of inland North Carolina. Mix in the contributions of American Indian languages; the remnants of African languages; and Europeans speaking Gaelic, German, French, and other languages, and the result is a regional and ethnic language ecology as varied as North Carolina’s physical topography and climate—the most varied of any state east of the Mississippi River.

Tar Heels in North Cackalacky

States commonly bear nicknames that highlight some attribute of the state, ranging from shape (for example, Keystone State for Pennsylvania) and location (Bay State for Massachusetts; Ocean State for Rhode Island) to its natural resources (Granite State for New Hampshire; Peach State for Georgia) or even presumed character attributes of the people (Show-Me State for Missouri; Equality State for Wyoming). There is always a story behind the nickname. Carolina, derived from Carolus, the Latin word for Charles, was originally named after King Charles I in 1629. The land from Albemarle Sound in the north to St. Johns River in present-day South Carolina was appropriated in the original territorial designation. When Carolina was divided into North Carolina and South Carolina officially in 1729, the older settlement in North Carolina was referred to as the Old North State, a nickname commonly used for a variety of purposes, including a state banner from 1893 (Figure 1.1). The official song of North Carolina, The Old North State, was adopted by the State Assembly in 1927. Though less common today, the nickname is still used on occasion.

FIGURE 1.1. The state banner of North Carolina, 1893. (Florida Center for Instructional Technology)

North Carolina, however, is much more frequently called the Tar Heel State, most likely alluding to major products of the colonial era—tar pitch and turpentine made from the longleaf and loblolly pine trees so prominent in the state. Earlier legends attribute the name to the laborers who walked out of the woods with the sticky black substance on their shoes or to stories of incidents during wars. One legend comes from the Revolutionary War, when North Carolina soldiers continued marching after wading through a river coated with liquid tar, but the most popular stories involve the Civil War, when the tar and turpentine industries were flourishing. One story, preserved in the Creecy Family Papers, reports that a regiment from Virginia supporting the North Carolina troops was driven from the field, leaving the North Carolina troops to fight alone. After the battle was won by the North Carolinians, they were greeted by the deserting soldiers from Virginia with the question, Any more tar down in the Old North State, boys? The North Carolinians responded, No; not a bit, old Jeff’s bought it all up, referring to Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate States of America at the time. When asked by the abandoning regiment what old Jeff was going to do with it, they were told: He’s going to put it on you’ns heels to make you stick better in the next fight. The legend continues that General Robert E. Lee was told about this incident, to which he responded, God bless the Tar Heel boys—and the name stuck.²

FIGURE 1.2. The Tar Heels Roll of Honor. (North Carolina Collection, UNC–Chapel Hill archives)

A less-flattering story of the origin of Tar Heel was recorded in John S. Farmer’s Americanisms, Old and New, published in 1889.³ He recounts a battle involving Mississippi and North Carolina soldiers in which the brigade of North Carolinians performed poorly. According to Farmer, the Mississippians taunted the North Carolinians about their failure to tar their heels in the morning, leaving them unable to hold their position.

People from North Carolina have also been referred to as Tar Boilers in reference to the distillation process used for producing tar and pitch. Pine logs were stacked and covered with dirt and burned, the tar running through channels on the low side of the pile—a messy and smelly process. In fact, poet Walt Whitman derisively referred to North Carolinians as Tar Boilers in 1888.⁴ This term faded, however, while Tar Heel has remained.

For a period after the Civil War, Tar Heel was viewed as a derogatory reference to North Carolinians, but it was rehabilitated by the turn of the twentieth century. Once a state nickname becomes associated with a university sports program, it sticks—much to the chagrin of rival athletic programs. The fact that Tar Heels as a nickname has been appropriated by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has certainly promoted its visibility and popularity. But those from rival state universities, such as North Carolina State University and East Carolina University, would prefer not to talk about the Tar Heel Nation as if it were synonymous with the state where they have competing athletic programs. The popularity of the nickname, however, is clear, and a book titled Talkin’ Tar Heel might just as readily be interpreted as a description of speech by students and staff on the UNC–Chapel Hill campus as a book about the speech of North Carolinians.

Tar Heel and Old North State are not the only nicknames for North Carolina, though competing monikers like Land of the Sky, Turpentine State, or Good Roads State have little popular currency. One of the popular and spreading nicknames for the state and its neighbor to the south, however, is the term Cackalacky. North Cackalacky and South Cackalacky, or their abbreviated forms, North Cack and South Cack, have both increased in popularity in recent years. The term’s currency is strong enough that it has been appropriated by commercial products that wish to reflect their regional heritage. Original Cackalacky Spice Sauce, a zesty, sweet potato–based sauce, was trademarked in 2001 and is now distributed in twenty-six states.⁵ The term Cackalacky for a sweet potato–based sauce is fitting since North Carolina produces approximately 40 percent of all the sweet potatoes consumed in the United States. In 1995 the tuber was designated as the state vegetable of North Carolina following a two-year campaign initiated by a group of fourth graders from Elvie Street School in Wilson.⁶ While the origin of Cackalacky is still uncertain, its history began long before the sauce was created. At the very least, we can definitively trace the term to 1937, when it was used in a popular song. It is likely that Cackalacky’s etymology runs much deeper than this song, however, and there remains much popular speculation and discussion about its possible origins.

The term may have arisen from a kind of sound-play utterance used to refer to the rural ways of people from Carolina—a play on the pronunciation of the state. Another hypothesis is that Cackalacky was derived from the Cherokee term tsalaki, pronounced as cha-lak-ee, the Cherokee pronunciation of Cherokee. Yet another hypothesis traces it to a cappella gospel groups in the American South in the 1930s, who used the rhythmic (but apparently meaningless) chant clanka lanka in their songs. Derivations related to the German word for cockroach (kakerlake) and a Scottish soup (cocklaleekie) have also been suggested, but no one really knows the origin. Certainly, the popularity of Cackalacky has risen in the last decade, and it has now become a positive term of solidarity used throughout the state. We favor the sound-play etymology for Cackalacky, but we are honestly just venturing our best guess. Support for the sound-play interpretation comes not only from earlier songs and references but also from a more recent song written by North Carolina folksinger Jonathan Byrd titled Cackalack (2011).⁷

FIGURE 1.3. Cackalacky becomes a commercial product. (Reprinted with permission from Cackalacky, Inc.)

95 South, 95 South, but that is the way to my baby’s house,

Cackalack cackalack, cackalack cackalack, cackalack cackalack;

I’m on 95 South and I ain’t goin’ back.

In this refrain, notice how cackalack is used in repetitive, rhythmic sequence at the same time it is linked with its Tar Heel State meaning. Unfortunately, the word Cackalacky also demonstrates how elusive tracking down word origins can sometimes be, even for professional linguists. Or maybe it simply speaks to an unwitting conspiracy of outsiders, insiders, the sweet potato industry, and the barbecue-sauce industry to highlight the significance of native status. For sure, it shows how a word can become strongly associated with identity, regardless of origin.

While we cannot be certain of the origin, the development of Cackalacky demonstrates how terms of reference can change over their life spans. Evidence from the 1940s suggests the term was used in a somewhat derogatory way by outsiders; for example, servicemen assigned to one of the rural bases in the state in the 1940s referred to their environs as Cackalacky, perhaps deriding the rural ways of native North Carolinians. Though it may have been intended as an insult by outsiders, it has now been embraced affectionately by native and adoptive residents.

The positive use of North Cackalacky is spreading, and the button that reads I speak North Cackalacky is one of the most popular items given away at our annual exhibit on languages and dialects at the North Carolina State Fair in Raleigh. But occasionally, we do get older North Carolinians who wonder why we are promoting a derogatory term. Their stories of how this term was used by outsiders to insult North Carolinians back in the day tend to support our contention that it was once used as a word-play insult by outsiders that has since reversed its meaning for residents of the state.

Tar Heel Words

Some dialect words, pronunciations, and sayings are heavily concentrated in North Carolina, but dialects don’t pay much attention to state boundaries. The lack of extensive natural boundaries separating North Carolina from South Carolina to the south and from Virginia to the north allow the dialects to spill over the state line, and the mountains in the western part of North Carolina are shared by eastern Tennessee so that the state line arbitrarily cuts across the mountain range. The dialect map given below—based on our community studies and other dialect surveys of the region for North Carolina and South Carolina—depicts how the major dialect areas disregard the state boundary. The lines separating dialect areas, technically called isoglosses, are idealized rather than absolute boundaries. Linguistic transitions tend to be gradual rather than abrupt. Even where natural boundaries of water may appear to set off one dialect region from another, there is often a transitional zone. For example, the Outer Banks islands are discretely separated from the mainland by the sounds but still show a transition area.

The map reflects the influence of early migration and European settlement on the major dialects of North Carolina, mostly southward through Virginia and inland from the coastal area. It also captures how North Carolina dialects have spread into South Carolina. At the same time, dialects diffused inland from Charleston, a major port of entry for some of the early population of the Palmetto State. It also illustrates the relative insignificance of the state boundary in the development of dialects.

MAP 1.1. Dialects and Settlement in North Carolina

The comprehensive, six-volume Dictionary of American Regional English, over a half century in the making, lists fewer than 100 words that are North Carolinian, and many of these, even those labeled chiefly or especially North Carolinian, extend beyond the state’s borders.⁸ Terms like Banker for a person from the Outer Banks and pocosin for a nontidal inland marsh or swamp that contains some ocean salts can be heard into Virginia and even Maryland, though their use may be more concentrated in North Carolina. Similarly, boomer (a type of red squirrel) and devil’s shoestring (hobblebush, branches spread upon the ground) are listed as North Carolinian though they extend into the mountains of eastern Tennessee.

At the same time, studies of North Carolina communities have turned up hundreds of dialect words that are restricted to particular regions within North Carolina. Outer Banks words like dingbatter, dit-dot, and woodser for outsiders have not been observed in any other state to our knowledge. Similarly, words like Russian rat (nutria), meehonkey (a cross between hide and seek and Marco Polo), buck (good friend), and slick cam (calm water in the sound) have not been found elsewhere. But they are also unknown by most native mainland North Carolinians and just about everyone who hasn’t grown up around these communities. Hundreds of community-restricted terms have eluded even the dialect word mavens of the Dictionary of American Regional English because they are so localized within the communities of North Carolina.

As mentioned, the NCLLP hosts an exhibit on the dialects and languages of North Carolina at the State Fair in Raleigh. As part of the exhibit, we offer free buttons featuring words from different dialects of North Carolina. Buttons with localized words like sigogglin (crooked, not straight or square), juvember (slingshot), dingbatter (outsider), and buddyrow (good friend) accompany our more-inclusive statewide buttons, such as I speak North Cackalacky and Bless your heart. The dialect words on the buttons represent just a few of the dialect communities of the state, but they also illustrate the different parameters that define a dialect word in North Carolina. The term juvember for sling shot is used mostly by the Lumbee Indians who live in the southeastern part of the state, but it is also known by some white and African American residents of that region. This word thus represents both a regional and ethnic dimension of North Carolina speech. Sigogglin (pronounced as sigh-gog-lin or sometimes as sigh-gog-ly), a label for something crooked or not straight or square, is used by speakers only in the mountains of the western part of the state, mostly in the Smoky Mountains. Other dialects of North Carolina use other words for describing objects that are not straight, such as cattywampus, catterwampus, whopperjawed, and antigoglin. Dingbatter, a term used on the Outer Banks for outsiders or nonnatives, is also a regionalized word within the state and limited to the Outer Banks; it is most concentrated in Ocracoke. The etymology of this word demonstrates how dialects are constantly changing and some of the peculiar reasons for their changes. On the 1970s sitcom television show All in the Family, the term dingbat was used by Archie Bunker (actor Carroll O’Connor) to refer to his wife, Edith (actor Jean Stapleton). It was appropriated and extended by residents of Ocracoke when islanders first received access to regular television during that period, including this popular sitcom. It seemed like a perfect way to describe the lack of common sense sometimes exhibited by tourists, replacing earlier terms for outsiders such as foreigner and stranger. While it is still in use today, it is losing ground to the blended term touron, which results from a combination of tourist and moron, demonstrating how dynamic and creative words can be.

At the other end of the insider-outsider dichotomy is the word buddyrow, a term for a good friend. Its use is scattered throughout North Carolina but extensively among the Lumbee Indians. Symbolically, it distinguishes a community insider, as do terms like cuz, buck, Lum, daddy, and so forth. Terms for insiders and outsiders indicate how important such designations are, even in our increasingly globalized world.

Make no mistake: there is a clear divide between outsiders who were born elsewhere and natives born and bred in the Old North State. Status as an authentic Tar Heel is a birthright, and the state offers no adoption papers for outsiders. Words are not just words—they index region, status, and identity, and some of these words are strongly connected to being North Carolinian. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s fight song captures how important words can be for identity, as it notes: I’m a Tar Heel born and a Tar Heel bred / And when I die I’m a Tar Heel dead. To no one’s surprise, it also adds (unofficially): Go to Hell, Duke!

Sounding Tar Heel

As pronunciation would have it, the names of counties, towns, rivers, and other landmarks in North Carolina can serve effectively to distinguish locals from outsiders. The following is a