Hoi toide on the outer banks: The story of the Ocracoke Brogue By Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schtlling-Estes (review)

BOOK NOTICES 457 source for research (it is easy to imagine, for example , using the bibliography as a resource for a survey ofwork on language and gender appearing inAmerican Speech or for a project on differences in male/female language in other languages). By expanding the bibliography to include the history of the last twenty years, K has—true to her goal—produced a work that will be useful to a new generation of students and their teachers. [Edwin Battistella, Wayne State College.] Hoi toide on the outer banks: The story of the Ocracoke Brogue. By Walt Wolfram and Natalie SchtllingEstes . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. xiv, 165. The dialect of Ocracoke Island is a familiar attraction for tourists going to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and the Ocracoke brogue, as it is known, has sometimes been associated in folklinguistics with Elizabethan English. In Hoi toide on the outerbanks, Wolfram and Schilling-Estes report on their fieldwork with over 70 islanders (or O'cokers as they call themselves). Hoi toide, however, is aimed not at a choir of linguists—though linguists will benefit by reading it—but rather at the general public, and it is sold in island tourist shops as well as university press outlets. Commendably, a portion of the royalties go to the Ocracoke Preservation Society. Handsomely done with many photos and maps and clearly and crisply written, the book is a welcome departure from the usual representation of dialect in popular literature and, for linguists, it provides a nice introduction to W & S-E's research on this dialect. The bookbegins with an introduction to "The roots of Ocracoke English' (1-28). Here W & S-E give some background on language change, the history of English, and the nature of dialects. They also dispel the idea that Ocracoke English is Elizabethan and discuss the settlement history of the island and its more recent history. In Ch. 2, 'What's in an O'coker word?' (29-49), W & S-E deal with the lexicon of the O'cokers, treating both recent island coinages (such as dingbatter, referring to someone from the mainland and supplanting the term foreigner) and older terms (such as momucked 'to bother' and quamished 'sick to the stomach'). The lexicon of Ocracoke English also includes words used in other areas ofthe South (such as caterwampus meaning 'crooked or diagonal'), some of which have novel meanings on the island (such as wampus cat, which is generally a fiction to scare children but used on the island to refer to someone abnormal). The chapter includes an eleven-page vocabulary list. Ch. 3, 'Sounding like a "Hoi Toider" (50-73), describes the distinct pronunciations of the dialect. W & S-E appropriately rely on user-friendly transcriptions such as hoi toide on the saind soid ('high tide on the sound side'). They point out that some ofthe pronunciations ofthe island, such as thevowels oy in high and ay in sound are characteristic of the Outer Banks while others are more generally highland Southern (such as ee and erfor uh, as in Virginee andfeller, and the use of a low back vowel in words like bar and far for bear and fire). Ch. 4, 'Saying a word or two' (74-96), discusses some syntactic patterns including a pattern of negative concord found in some British dialects (The dogs was . . . contrasting v/ith Iweren't), double modals, a-prefixing , the novel use of some in forming adjectives like uglysome or nastysome, and the use of bare plurals of measure words. The remainder of the book deals with some broader issues. In Ch. 5, 'No dialect is an island' (97-116), the authors discuss the similarities between the Ocracoke dialect and other American dialects . They note a particular affinity between Ocracoke pronunciation and syntax and that of the Appalachianregion, butthey also find thatthe vocabulary of the island is closest to that ofthe geographically nearer lowland Southern dialect. In Ch. 6 'Ebb tide for hoi toide?' (117-36), the authors discuss the problem of endangered dialects (which is often overlooked, as opposed to the issue of endangered languages), the scientific and cultural reasons for dialect preservation, and the prospects for a revival ofthe Ocracoke brogue. The final...