Tag: North Carolina

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.

Ecosystem lost and found?

Looking for Longleaf. The Fall and Rise of an American Forest by Lawrence S. Earley (2004) Chapel Hill. University of North Carolina Press. 322pp.

When I was a teenager, my grandfather recalled for me how the longleaf pine forests in eastern North Carolina looked when he was young, some seventy to eighty years before. It was like being in a cathedral, he said, with the trunks of the trees like columns and the forest floor clear as far as you could see. This book gives an introduction to the character and extent of the longleaf pine ecosystem, once dominant over a vast region of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain, introducing the plant, Pinus palustris, the diversity of associated plants (sometimes hundreds of species in a square kilometer and as many as 40-60 in a square meter) and several of the more distinctive animals, like gopher tortoise and red-cockaded woodpecker.

Earley explains the critical role of fire and soil in establishing the diversity of types within the overall longleaf ecosystem.

The middle part of the book is a historical account of the European encounter with the forest, its exploitation by the naval stores industry and its eventual destruction by that industry and the railroad based loggers. Some of these descriptions fit closely with what I heard from my grandfather and from a friend in North Carolina (whom Earley interviewed for the section on turpentining). He talks about rafting logs down the coastal rivers (as my grandfather, born in 1869, did as a boy) and shipping naval stores (my grandfather also described how the cooper made the barrels for turpentine). He explains that what preserved so much of the forest were the limitation of cutting timber to areas close to usable streams, that is until the railroads came. My father (born 1913) recalled how the railroad was brought in to log some of the most remore and inaccessible places when he was growing up. Some time around 1970, before the railroad was finally abandoned, I saw carloads of longleaf pine stumps waiting to be hauled off to extract the valuable resins or to make fatwood kindling, sold by L.L. Bean, among others. Earley also mentions the continued interest in salvaging sunken logs and getting lumber from old buildings.

The final chapters are on the development of forest management ideas, from failed attempts at replanting to replacement by loblolly and slash pine and the gradual development of methods to regenerate longleaf, first as even aged stands but now moving towards uneven age management and overall ecosystem restoration. Red-cockaded woodpecker played a key role in several changes in policy, driven by court decisions under the Endangered Species Act. Many of the agencies involved, like the US forest Service have serious problems dealing with the steady increase in scientific and ecological understanding of the forests. Institutional change is difficult, especially when institutional memory is impaired by frequent reassignment of key people and political pressures. The US Forest Service has had an especially hard time admitting it has been wrong about fire suppression and even-aged management.

He talks about the role of national and state forests and of large and small private landholders (currently there is increasing longleaf acgeage on federal and maybe state land and on large private conservation holdings, but continued losses on timber company lands and small private holdings) and what the trends may mean for the future of the ecosystem and many of its species. New incentives under the Conservation Reserve Program may be changing the minds of some private owners. It is possible to derive a pretty steady income from restored longleaf, partly through sale of raked needles in the 10th to 15th years after replanting. Poles are much in demand, using middle aged trees. The author seems most impressed by adaptive management approaches using small group-selection cuts and frequent growing season fire. Several interesting examples are described in the next to last chapter on restoration. Some of these areas sound like they would be worth seeing, and there are some groups that can help with restoration, a topic that is on my mind lately, as I and my brothers and sisters still hold a small remnant of thousands of acres of longleaf land owned by my great-great grandfather in the early 1800s. We will soon be clearing the stand of loblolly pine, planted decades ago, to make way for longleaf again.