High Tider
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
High Tider or "Hoi Toider" is a dialect of American English spoken in very limited communities of the South Atlantic United States[1]—particularly, several small island and coastal townships of the rural North Carolina "Down East" seaside region that encompasses the Outer Banks and Pamlico Sound (specifically including Atlantic, Sea Level, and Harkers Island in eastern Carteret County, and also Ocracoke) as well as of the Chesapeake Bay (such as Tangier and Smith Island). The term is also a local nickname for any native resident of these regions. [Note from yer narrator AS: This is a slightly too restrictive place definition. The startlingly pure Elizabethan English accent remains somewhat more widely located across the eastern N.C. Coastal Plain than what Wiki says. Certainly waning with generational change etc., but still heard among the Great Old Ones.]
This dialect does not have one name uniformly used in the academic literature, but is referenced by a variety of names, including Hoi Toider (or, more restrictively based on region, Down East, Chesapeake Bay, or Outer Banks) English, dialect, brogue, or accent.[2] The Atlas of North American English does not consider High Tider English to be a subset of Southern English (due to not participating in the first stage of the Southern Vowel Shift), but it shares commonalities as a full member of the Southeastern super-dialect region (in fronting the /oʊ/ and /aʊ/ vowels, exhibiting the pin–pen merger, resisting the cot–caught merger, and being strongly rhotic).
Contents
1 History
2 Phonological features
3 Lexical features
4 In popular culture
5 Further reading
6 Notes
History
The term appears in a local colloquial rhyme, "It's high tide on the sound side," often phonetically spelled "hoi toide on the saind soide,"[3] as a marker of pronunciation (or shibboleth) to sharply differentiate speakers of this dialect from speakers of the mainland Southern dialects.
With a long history of geographical and economic isolation from mainland North Carolina, residents of Harkers Island and other Outer Banks islands, such as Ocracoke, and also extending to the town of Atlantic have developed a distinct dialect of English, commonly referred to as High tider, that can be traced back to influences directly of the Elizabethan period.[citation needed] The dialect of these island communities developed in almost complete isolation for over 250 years. High Tider English shares features with other regional dialects of the US Atlantic coast. Pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammatical constructions can be traced to eastern and southwestern England; see Westcountry dialect. The dialect has survived because the community continues to depend on traditional trades, like fishing, boat building, and decoy carving, and the coastal tourism trade developed on High Tider English much later than islands like Ocracoke.[4][5]
As many as 500 islanders on Harkers Island are directly descended from the Harkers Island and Outer Banks settlers that developed this distinct dialect. Linguists from North Carolina State University, East Carolina University, and other academic institutions continue to conduct research on the island dialect.[4]...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Tider
