Tag: African Americans

Linguistic Exploration in Carolina

Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina by Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser. University of North Carolina Press. 2016.

I read the Kindle edition which has all the photos and links to audio and video samples.

North Carolina has as rich a diversity of dialects of English as any linguist could hope to find in the U.S. say Walt and Jeffrey, two linguistics professors at North Carolina State University. They ought to know, having conducted thousands of interviews all across the state from Matteo in the east to Murphy in the west, as part of the North Carolina Language and Life Project.

Their book aims to give those not trained in linguistics an idea of just how diverse Tarheel speech is and to show how history, geography and culture have shaped the way residents of the state talk. 

I grew up from age five to twenty-one in a college town in the Research Triangle within the North Carolina Piedmont. In that time, I was exposed to a large sample of the various regional dialects, from the local kids around town and the ones from further out in the country, who attended to schools in town. I ran into more diversity traveling from the mountains to the coast, with my family, my friends, their families and the Boy Scouts. Later, I worked summers with a variety of custodians, construction laborers, mailmen and others, black and white, old and young. As upper middle-class southerners, my family employed African American maids and babysitters, as did my grandparents and my friends’ parents. This was the era just before full integration of North Carolina’s public schools, so I had only token contact with African American speech there. 

My first significant contact with Spanish speakers was when I went to college for two years in New Mexico. North Carolina had only a tiny population of Hispanics then. That changed rapidly in the 1990s, and it profoundly affected the area where my father grew up, and where I still own a piece of the family land. The explosive growth of the hog farming and pork packing industry brought hundreds of Mexicans and Central Americans to the little tiny town that I had known since I was a child: besides the farms and packing plants, a world-famous garment factory employed Hispanic women for their sewing skills. Spanish stores, a pool room and restaurants reoccupied the increasingly deserted main street. On the corner near our land, a derelict country store was made into a very authentic Mexican restaurant, an oasis in what had become essentially a food desert.

My father’s family is from the southeastern corner of the state. My mother’s family, though, is from Ohio, and I lived from ages two through four in Minnesota, so my earliest linguistic influences from family and playmates were only partly “southern.” Thus, most people I meet don’t recognize me as a southerner by my speech. Interestingly, of my four younger siblings, my two sisters show the most pronounced North Carolina accents, and both have a greater tendency to use such characteristic expressions as “you all.” All of them learned to talk while living in N.C. and they are ordered brother – sister – brother – sister, so it’s not a matter of age. It seems perhaps to be a question of peer interactions, but I’m not sure why it worked out like that. 

There’s more to this as well: my father had only moderate traces of his rural southern upbringing in his speech, although his five siblings (one brother, four sisters) all had stronger accents. My paternal grandfather (born 1869, died 1965) also lacked very strong rural North Carolina speech, although his wife, who was from Virginia, certainly sounded “southern.” Perhaps education was a factor: both father and grandfather attended the University of North Carolina, as well as other schools. Class was also a factor, perhaps, both were medical doctors. 

One trace of regional speech that I noticed in my father and grandfather was a slight broadening of certain vowel sounds. This was more memorably apparent to me in my great uncle, whom I saw often while growing up. He was college educated also, but he attended NC State College (as it was then called). Fans of the teams of other schools referred to it as Moo U. This may have reflected a perceived, possibly real, difference in social class from those who went to Duke and UNC. At any rate, when my great uncle pronounced the word “pond,” it came out as “pawned.” I have wondered whether this was a feature carried over from the speech of my great great great grandfather, who came from Orkney, Scotland, to North Carolina in the 1760’s. He was a late participant in the migration of Scots to North Carolina, and I don’t think that Orkney speech was exactly like that of the Scots-Irish or the Highland Scots who came earlier. My ancestors came to Orkney, probably from the Black Isle on the southern edge of the Highlands, as early as the fifteenth century.

I picked up over the years a couple of other curious tidbits that suggest the persistence of early ancestral immigration: one was my grandfather telling us that, “If it rains on Saint Swithen’s day, it will rain for forty days.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swithun) The other is the use of the name “didapple,” pronounced “die-dapple,” for a pied billed grebe. I heard this from the son of one of my father’s childhood friends, as we stood beside their large millpond, looking at various birds. This appears to be a variant of the name dive-dapper, used by Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis.

Talkin Tarheel is a rich tapestry of similar history, culture, and personal stories, all showing how people came to talk as they do and how those distinct dialects are evolving in the twenty-first century. As the authors are constantly emphasizing, no language is ever static, least of all one in a place undergoing rapid demographic and economic change. Old ways of living and speaking are disappearing, such those of the “hoi toiders,” from the Outer Banks and of the mountain folks, like the last of the old-time moonshiners. These dialects are in danger of being lost as living speech. Both these groups feature in several sound and video clips from the Language and Life Project. 

Other groups are very unlikely to lose their distinctive forms of speech, although they to are changing in response to growing urbanization, mass communication and other factors. I first heard of the Lumbee Indians back in 1958, when I saw the headlines about the battle they fought against the KKK at Maxton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Hayes_Pond) This story is rightfully excluded from a book that tries to include and value all North Carolinians (not the Klan as such, of course, but the rural whites, who might be unfairly associated with that detestable group). I was very happy to read that the Lumbee are doing well, and that they maintain their own dialect of English proudly. At 55,000 enrolled members, they are the largest population of Native Americans East of the Mississippi, though they have yet to receive the federal recognition they deserve. It is unfortunate that almost no trace of their original language can be found, unlike the much smaller Cherokee tribe, who still live in the western mountains and who are working hard to keep their language, famously given written form by Sequoia, alive.

There are many stories of African American history to accompany the discussion of their dialect (or dialects, as there is an increasing urban vs rural difference). Freedom Hill, on the Tar River, was incorporated as Princeville, making it the first African American town in the U.S. There is a wonderful clip telling of the struggles of Princeville to survive in the face of floods from recent hurricanes. Even if, like me, you don’t like to see rebuilding in flood prone areas, it’s impossible not to admire Princeville’s community spirit. Likewise, there is an interesting account of the Freedman’s Colony on Roanoke Island, the place of Lost Colony fame. When I go there again, I must visit the museum display that tells its story. 

Talkin Tarheel is full of fascinating linguistic detail, showing how much the application of painstaking scientific techniques can illuminate even very subtle distinctions among dialects, such as the tendency of Hispanics to retain the syllable timed pattern of Spanish when speaking their dialect of English, unlike the stress timed pattern used by most English speakers. 

The authors conclude with a celebration of the diversity of dialects in North Carolina and express the hope that through efforts like the North Carolina Language and Life Project, linguistics can help erase the stigma and prejudice that distinctive speech too often evokes and instead appreciate the variety of ways of Talkin Tarheel.

This post is dedicated to the late, much missed, MEB, who loved language and loved teaching and defending the interests of her young, immigrant Hispanic students in Alamance County.

Struggling for liberty, post Civil War

The Republic for Which It Stands, The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896, Oxford History of the United States by Richard White. Oxford University Press, 2017, 968 pages.

I listened to the Audible edition, ably read by Noah Michael Levine. This is another entry in Oxford’s multi-volume history, which includes James McPherson’s excellent Battle Cry of Freedom, The Civil War Era. The author casts the history of the last third of the nineteenth century as a struggle among competing definitions of freedom. He builds much of his narrative around the way in which the ideals articulated by Abraham Lincoln shaped the struggles of the period. Republicans were the party of free labor, seen as the key to every man being able to build and maintain a secure home for his family. Free labor, which was taken to mean freedom of contract between employers and employees, was often invoked to justify government inaction in the face of unfair and exploitative relations. The ideal of the home drove both the efforts to support freed slaves and to acculturate Native Americans to the values and religion of whites, whether they liked it or not. Similarly, the home was man’s castle, but too often, it was the woman’s prison.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, the future of millions of freed slaves was the most obvious problem facing the country. The efforts of the federal government to provide for these people and to protect them from the exploitation and violence they faced in the South were hampered by unwillingness to expropriate the lands of rebels, reluctance to maintain troops in the rebel states, and lack of resources to provide for the largely destitute freedmen. Racism contributed to northern indifference and southern resistance. On the other hand, the Republican Party saw the former slaves as a pool of potential votes. There was some success in the immediate aftermath of the war, but in the end, the “old barons,” the large landholders, were able to reestablish control in most of the South. The desire to put the freedmen to work and end their dependence on government provisions, forced most into labor or tenancy agreements that left them little better off than before emancipation.

Nevertheless they resisted the attempts to reduce them to something like their previous condition, and in some parts of the South, they were able to do so for awhile. As the old political order was reestablished, however, they were met with more and more violent repression. As the last federal troops left, the regime of Jim Crow was firmly established, cemented in place by disastrous Supreme Court rulings that allowed false promises of “separate but equal” to count for “the equal protection of the laws.” Despite the gains of the Civil Rights movement, generations later, the current Black Lives Matter campaign and the resistance it engenders show we remain short of the goal.

The other major issue was the future of the western states and territories, especially in the prairie and Great Plains. The Homestead Act and massive land grants to the railroads were intended to open up these regions to agriculture, as well as linking the Pacific Coast to the rest of the country. In the lands between the Mississippi River and the 100th meridian, this strategy was successful, leading to enormous demographic and economic growth. In the arid regions further west, it largely failed, as did efforts to remove the Plains Indians to reservations without bloodshed. Inconsistent policies and lack of understanding and respect for Native American cultures led to a string of broken treaties, wars and massacres by both sides. Railroads made the slaughter of the bison herds into a profitable business, and in the end the army forced the Indians into small reservations. [Ironically, the famous Buffalo Soldiers, black cavalry units including many Union Civil War veterans, were part of the forces deployed. According to one history I read, they suffered more violence at the hands of white townspeople in the communities they were protecting than from the Native Americans.]

In moving to the Gilded Age, White covers a vast array of developments, including the rapid rise of industry, especially steel and railroads, both for their economic importance and for their large role in the struggle for labor rights. He also details the conflict over monetary policy, especially as it split different interest groups and sections of the country and shaped the national political scene. He describes the rise of the temperance movement and the larger preoccupation with home and morality it was part of. White shows how all these developments were seen by the leading contemporary observers and activists. It is especially interesting to learn how the generation that had supported anti-slavery and free labor tried to understand the new realities that emerged with mass industrial employment, increasing immigration and rising wealth and consumption.

In thinking about all of these questions, it is impossible to miss the parallels to our era. We struggle with questions about rapid social and economic change, labor rights, the role of marriage and the family and immigration among others. One difference is that a populist insurgency has succeeded in electing its candidate President. So far though, there seems to be no stopping the momentum that is taking us back towards the economic inequality of the Gilded Age.

All in all, The Republic for Which It Stands is a detailed political, economic and social history that serves as a very readable (listenable) introduction to the periods it covers. There is a very extensive annotated bibliography. I’d like to try more volumes in this Oxford series.

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