upworthy

north carolina

Community

The remote island where residents speak a fascinating blend of Southern and Old English

Experts say Ocracoke's endlessly-entertaining dialect is rapidly disappearing.

BBC Global/YouTube & EZScore/Flickr

An isolated island called Ocracoke is home to a unique accent not found anywhere else in the world

American English comes in all sorts of different flavors and varieties. I grew up in Baltimore, which shares some dialectical DNA with the accent you find in other Northeastern cities like Philadelphia. Baldamor, hon! There's the New England dialects, most famously the Boston accent: Pahk the cah at Havahd yahd! The New York accent is world famous, as is the deep Southern twang, which gives way to a thick Cajun accent the closer you get to the water in Florida and Louisiana.

These are all different versions of the greater American dialect. But there is one place, a tiny island off the coast of North Carolina, where a few residents speak in such a unique way that it's not even identified as American by most people around the world.

Ocracoke, North Carolina is home to a unique dialect called the Brogue: A strange blend of American Southern, Old Elizabethan English, with little bits of Irish and even Australian thrown in.


 ocracoke, north carolina, the brogue, hoi toider, accents, dialect, language, linguistics, anthropology Americans think Hoi Toider sounds English. People from England think it sounds like something else.  Giphy  

The Brogue, also known as Hoi Toider, is absolutely fascinating to hear in action. When you watch interviews with the locals of the island, they at first appear to be speaking a form of deep American southern — you can hear the twang the way you might in parts of Georgia of Alabama. But then, without warning, a word or phrase will slip out that sounds distinctly British. Old English even. Then you'll swear you hear a bit of Irish!

The dialect owes its roots to a surprising source: Pirates.

Pirates loved to hide out on Ocracoke as the island is incredibly remote, about 20 miles from the mainland of North Carolina. Even today there are no bridges or flights to Ocracoke; it can only be reached by a (quite lengthy) boat ride. Eventually, the island was actually purchased by the Blackbeard's quartermaster (yes, that Blackbeard), William Howard, where he created something of a pirate settlement. English sailors and Native American tribes also passed through and had their own unique impact on the culture and developing language of the island.


 ocracoke, north carolina, blackbeard, pirates, the brogue, hoi toider, accents, dialect, language, linguistics, anthropology Legend has it Blackbeard himself named the island.  Giphy  

In case have your doubts about the island's buccaneerish roots: "In one popular island legend, Ocracoke comes from the phrase, 'Oh, crow cock,' which was spoken by the infamous pirate Blackbeard as he waited to do battle at sunrise with the governor’s forces that had come to capture him," writes a guide from NC State University.

The dialect had a lot of room to develop without much outside influence. The BBC writes, "Howard's community lived in near-isolation for almost two centuries. Electricity didn't arrive at the island until 1938 and a ferry service didn't start until 1957, leaving the islanders cut off except for the occasional supply trip to the mainland."

That's why Hoi Toider is still alive to this day, although its speaking population has dwindled. Here are a few hallmark phrases of the unique dialect:

A 'dingbatter' is anyone not from the island; a tourist. An 'O'Cocker' is anyone born on the island of Ocracoke. A 'buck' is a good male friend, while a 'puck' is a female friend. The Brogue uses 'weren't' liberally for singular nouns ("The sun weren't out yesterday.") and frequently adds an 'a' in front of verbs ("We went a-fishin' this morning").

But to fully appreciate Hoi Toider, you've got to hear it in action:


  - YouTube  www.youtube.com  

Experts say, as awesome as the Brogue is, it will likely disappear within the next 50 years.

Though the island remains about as remote as it comes, in 2025 there's no escaping the influence of social media, television, and film. Every generation born on the island is a smidge less-adoptive of the Brogue than the one that came before.

It will probably be mostly gone in the next couple of generations, which feels like a tragedy. Instead of "dingbatter" and "buck," the kids will be saying "Skibidi toilet" and "rizz." OK, maybe that's an exaggeration, but young people growing up on the island won't be as immersed in the language as their elders and will begin to speak more and more like your average American.

  - YouTube  www.youtube.com  

There's a concept called culture homogenization. It's the idea that over time, because of technology and globalization, unique individual cultures from around the world will all start to look more and more the same. It's why you see fast food restaurants directly next to the Leaning Tower of Pisa and people all over the globe listening to the same handful of musical artists.

Ocracoke has managed to hang on longer than most places due to how difficult it is to reach. Here's hoping that the Ocracoke Brogue can survive somehow, some way, in little pockets of the island. It's just too dang cool and interesting to go away just yet.

This article originally appeared in May.

From Your Site Articles
accents
More

A 9-year-old just perfectly broke down what living with autism is like for him.

George Yionoulis is pretty much your typical 9-year-old.

The fourth-grader from Raleigh, North Carolina, loves "Harry Potter," making art, and eating tacos.

Oh, and he loooooooves dancing. The kid has some serious moves.

While it's pretty easy to understand why George loves tacos (who doesn't?), there are some things George does that aren't quite as easy for people to understand. That's because when was 2 years old, his parents discovered has an autism spectrum disorder.

George's autism makes it harder for his classmates at Douglas Elementary School to relate to him. So he used a class project to help them understand him a little better.

George wrote, narrated, edited, and produced a video called "My Autism" and even created an original score to accompany the six-minute clip.

"Hi, everybody. My name is George," George begins his voiceover as text reading "GEORGE ... and AUTISM" flashes across the screen before cutting to footage of George dancing.

"Let me tell you a little about myself," he continues. "I have fun dancing, I have fun making music, I love to draw and make art, and ... wait for it ... I have this thing called autism."

In the video, George shares some of his unique quirks — things he knows his classmates have noticed about him but maybe haven't had the courage to ask about.

Like the fact that he has trouble making eye contact with people when they speak to him, though he says he's gotten better about it. "I might not have been looking, but that didn't mean I wasn't listening," he explains.

"Speaking of listening," he continues. "I can hear and see a lot of things and sounds all at the same time, which sometimes makes it hard to focus on any one sound or thought. That's why it might take a little more time to answer you when you ask a question."

He also has trouble with metaphors and figures of speech, which is common for kids with autism, and advises his classmates to be as literal and clear with him as possible.

"If you say 'take a seat,' you might find one less chair in your classroom," he jokes.

George also opens up about some of the challenges he faces and hopes the video will help his friends understand why he sometimes gets angry, cries, or yells."

I sometimes get frustrated when I get interrupted or when something doesn't go as planned," he admits. "Or when something unexpected happens. Or when I make a mistake."

In a courageous peek behind the curtain, George even includes video of himself — at a much younger age — throwing a tantrum at a book reading as well as audio of himself stumbling with his words while recording the narration for the video and becoming audibly frustrated. "But I messed up!" he cries.

"(Some of those) are just kid things to get frustrated about, and I'm a kid just like you," he says. "All us kids are different in our own ways, right?"

At the end, George asks his classmates to come talk to him, ask him questions, or invite him to play — even if it seems like he might not want to.

"I like having fun, just like you. So if you ever see me playing by myself, it doesn't necessarily mean I don't want to play with you, too," he tells them. "I always want to play with you."

His heartwarming honesty and larger-than-life on-screen personality are so compelling, it's no wonder the video has gone viral. Shortly after the video went up on YouTube and Facebook, it racked up tens of thousands of views and hundreds of comments.

Initially, it was only meant for George's 21 elementary school classmates.

"The feedback we're getting is, 'I showed this to my 6-year-old who has autism, I showed this to my 12-year-old who has autism,' and they're going, 'Me too, and we could be friends!'" his mother, Lisa Jolley told Raleigh-Durham's WTVD/ABC11.

In a world where people with autism aren't often given the chance to speak for themselves, it's both really cool and really significant that George has taken control of his own life story and experience and is sharing them in his own words. At only 9 years old, he's already making huge strides in helping the world better understand a condition that affects about 1 in 68 kids in the United States.

Watch the full video below, and you'll probably learn something new yourself.

At the very least, you're bound to fall in love with this charming and courageous kid.

George's journey with autism at 9 years old. This is the video he shared with his fourth grade class to help them understand why he behaves the way he does...

From Your Site Articles
Family

Family creates an NFL-style draft to assign Thanksgiving cooking and cleaning duties

Is this family too organized or do you want to be adopted by them?

via Crcederberg/TikTok

Colleen Rast Cederberg's Thanksgiving Draft.

When Thanksgiving is done right, families evenly divide the labor so that everything gets done and nobody works too hard. Someone takes charge of roasting the turkey, others contribute with sides, somebody is on dishes, and there’s always one family member happy to mix up some cocktails.

While most families shouldn't have to resort to aggressive tactics to ensure this balance, Colleen Rast Cederberg, 31, has created a unique solution to keep the labor duties in her family. She made a “Thanksgiving Draft.”

"My sisters were spending all day cooking, and my brothers were spending all evening cleaning and I was just kind of hearing from both sides that there was kind of an imbalance," Rast Cederberg, the middle child of 5 siblings, told Fox News Digital.

Rast Cederberg explained how the draft works in a TikTok video that has been seen 650,000 times.

"This is how I do Thanksgiving so that my siblings and I don't kill each other," Rast Cederberg opens her video. "We give every dish a point value from one to three. The cranberry dish is a one and the turkey is a three."

Thanksgiving Draft 2023 

@crcederberg

Thanksgiving Draft 2023 #thanksgiving @gregrast0

In the weeks leading up to the holiday, the family jumps on a video call to choose their particular dishes, just like NFL general managers do during their annual draft. They also decide who’s on cleaning and dish duty.

"We all draft what dishes we want to make,” she says in the video. “We also do this thing called ‘flex kitchen,’ which means you basically hang out in the kitchen for an hour and our job is to keep the kitchen clean – so unload the dishwasher if it's ready, helping out the people cooking, whatever it takes to keep the kitchen moving."

While some family members think it’s a little too rigid to outline of “rules and responsibilities on Thanksgiving," Rast Cederberg says everyone happily participates in the system.

The Thanksgiving Draft has received a lot of love in the TikTok comments section from people who love organization. “My type A personality is obsessed with this. Dear lord, I wish my family was like this lol,” Nicole A Gaskins wrote. “I have never desired hanging out with people as much as I do right now. Omg the organization, the spreadsheets. It's all so beautiful,” Buzzsaw408 added.

One big question in the comments inspired a quick follow-up video from Rast Cederberg. “I wanna know the root fight that happened where this was the solution?” Optimistic asked.

"I had older siblings that were doing all the cooking and younger siblings that were doing all of the cleaning and this was my solution to kind of smooth everything between the two factions because everyone should do a little bit of both,” Rast Cederberg said in a subsequent TikTok post.

Once you thought that Rast Cederberg’s draft was taking Thanksgiving organization as far as it can go, she dropped this nugget: An AI-generated schedule for cooking the holiday meal. She fed ChatGPT all of the recipes she is going to make on Thanksgiving, and it created a detailed cooking schedule for the entire meal.

More Thanksgiving planning hacks this one complements of @bjc6109 

@crcederberg

More Thanksgiving planning hacks this one complements of @bjc6109 #thanksgiving #chatgpt #planning #holiday

From Your Site Articles
thanksgiving
Democracy

New congressman drops truth bomb about fellow politicians on his 100th day in office

"Most of the really angry voices in Congress are totally faking it."

Rep. Jeff Jackson/Twitter

Rep. Jeff Jackson, D-N.C., shared a video about what he's learned in his first few months in Congress.

Politics has never been free of outrage and fearmongering, but only in recent decades have those base methods of drumming up support been shoved in our faces 24/7. Unfortunately, politicians know that fueling rage and fear gets them attention, which in turn gets them valuable media coverage, and some are shameless about capitalizing on it.

It's how random members of Congress from tiny rural districts gain massive national name recognition while hundreds of non-inflammatory, non-extremist, non-outrage-baity lawmakers quietly go about the business of governance with few Americans able to pick them out of a lineup.

Outrage-fueled notoriety is what prompted Rep. Jeff Jackson, Democrat of North Carolina—most likely a legislator you've never heard of—to make a video on his 100th day in Congress, where he shared something he's learned about his fellow elected leaders.


"I'm still brand new to Congress—I've only been there 100 days—and I don't know if I'm not supposed to say this out loud, but it's true and important. And if you don't know this, you need to," he said. "It's really clear from working there for just a few months that most of the really angry voices in Congress are totally faking it. These people who have built their brands around being perpetually outraged? It's an act."

Perhaps this is not groundbreaking news for a lot of us, but it's refreshing to hear from someone on the inside, especially since Jackson explains how he knows their outrage is an act—and why.

"I've been in committee meetings that are open to the press and committee meetings that are closed," he said. "The same people who act like maniacs during the open meetings are suddenly calm and rational during the closed ones. Why? Because there aren't any cameras in the closed meetings, so their incentives are different."

Jackson goes on to explain how members of Congress are surrounded by negative incentives, with media outlets that feed off of negative emotion giving them air time because it keeps people angry.

"If they can keep you angry, they'll hold your attention," he said. "And they both want your attention."

Watch:

Jackson doesn't name any particular members of Congress or even point to any particular political party in his video. In reality, politicians on both sides of the aisle are guilty of playing these kinds of games and always have been.

The problem, of course, is that the governance of a nation isn't a game. But politics is, especially hyper-partisanized politics, and that game has only become more competitive and more winner-takes-all in the age of modern media.

When George Washington tried to warn the American people of the "rankness" of partisanship and where its "continual mischief" and "constant danger of excess" could lead us, he was spot on in his predictions. But what he couldn't have predicted was the role that television and social media would play in elevating that mischief and excess.

As problematic as the political arena has been in the past, it's nothing compared to how fear and outrage have been wielded as weapons in the technological age. We have 24-hour cable channels funneling hate and fear-based prejudice into our psyches, and social media algorithms that fuel negative attention grabs. Demonizing the "other side" of the political spectrum to the point of describing one's fellow Americans as "the enemy" is outright bonkers—but it'll practically guarantee you an interview on prime-time television, and therefore a seat at powerful tables.

We—all of us—need to not only recognize manufactured outrage and fearmongering, but we need to learn to truly ignore it. Ignoring it won't necessarily make it go away, but for people who seek power above all else, all attention is good attention. When we give attention seekers what they want, we only feed the beast. Even when we give them attention to complain about them, we're still giving them oxygen.

Instead, let's try something different, like focusing our energies on the people who are actually doing the hard work of governance and genuinely serving their constituencies in a spirit of public service. As Jackson said, "If you don't have to yell to be heard, the whole conversation changes." Perhaps we can stop listening to the yellers and start engaging with the talkers who understand how to discuss and negotiate intelligently, in ways that make sense. These are, after all, the people who actually get things done behind closed doors.

From Your Site Articles
Trending Stories