Here's some interesting dialect from the other side of the state, which is gradually dying out, along with the commercial fishing industry whose members sustained it for generations. My stepfather still has strong traces of the Outer Banks brogue.
Here's another video on the subject. By the way, we're all dingbatters here.
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8 comments:
Wow I need subtitles to follow that even a bit.
It's a bit hard to follow, for sure. My stepfather told me that when he was growing up, he and his pals would talk in the brogue when they didn't want their teachers to understand what they were saying (I suppose that their teachers must have all been dingbatters).
I like that word mommuck.
When we lived in North Carolina, we would occasionally run into someone whose accent was so thick, even I couldn't understand it (and I'm pretty good with accents). Maybe it was the Ocracoke brogue. The only accent I was aware of in the Carolinas was Geechee, and that's a black accent. It's amazing how many dialects there are within dialects, and kind of sad that Network English is killing them off.
Rebecca: Interesting that you mention Geechee. I was unfamiliar with the dialect (a sort of creole from the low country in South Carolina and Georgia), but the word instantly rung a bell: Cab Calloway's song, "Geechee Joe", which starts out, "Way down in Charleston, lives old Geechee Joe..." So, I learned something today!
The "Hoi-Toider" lingo mostly comes from West Country English, and is likely similar to the English William Shakespeare spoke. Someone from rural Devon would likely understand it without much difficulty.
Many of Shakespeare's lines in his plays rhyme in the West Country dialect, and are quite often naughty puns.
Yes we know that arse/ass were homonyms (same sound) in Shakespeare's day because he made a joke in Midsummer Night's Dream with the character 'Bottoms' becoming an ass (donkey). Old puns are a clue to how words sounded.
And Bristol in Somerset (West Country) was UK's major port before Liverpool, c200 yrs ago. Somerset is where they all roll their 'r's and 'talk like pirates' even today. So a lot of people there went to sea - including my grt grt grt grandfather who was a Master Mariner captain and was married in Bristol.
Irish only learned English about 100 plus years ago and aren't hard to understand, but people who always spoke English as their native language for over a thousand years have the weirdest accents because they hark back to the roots.
Now I see that Ocracoke was badly flooded by hurricane.
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