What do you think?
Rate this book
Talkin' Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina
Are you considered a "dingbatter," or outsider, when you visit the Outer Banks?
Have you ever noticed a picture in your house hanging a little "sigogglin," or crooked?
Do you enjoy spending time with your "buddyrow," or close friend?
Drawing on over two decades of research and 3,000 recorded interviews from every corner of the state, Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser's lively book introduces readers to the unique regional, social, and ethnic dialects of North Carolina, as well as its major languages, including American Indian languages and Spanish. Considering how we speak as a reflection of our past and present, Wolfram and Reaser show how languages and dialects are a fascinating way to understand our state's rich and diverse cultural heritage. The book is enhanced by maps and illustrations and augmented by more than 100 audio and video recordings, which can be found online at talkintarheel.com.
Have you ever noticed a picture in your house hanging a little "sigogglin," or crooked?
Do you enjoy spending time with your "buddyrow," or close friend?
Drawing on over two decades of research and 3,000 recorded interviews from every corner of the state, Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser's lively book introduces readers to the unique regional, social, and ethnic dialects of North Carolina, as well as its major languages, including American Indian languages and Spanish. Considering how we speak as a reflection of our past and present, Wolfram and Reaser show how languages and dialects are a fascinating way to understand our state's rich and diverse cultural heritage. The book is enhanced by maps and illustrations and augmented by more than 100 audio and video recordings, which can be found online at talkintarheel.com.
331 pages, Hardcover
First published April 7, 2014
20 people are currently reading
155 people want to read
About the author
Walt Wolfram
45 books5 followersWalt Wolfram (born February 15, 1941) is a sociolinguist at North Carolina State University, specializing in social and ethnic dialects of American English. He was one of the early pioneers in the study of urban African American English through his work in Detroit in 1969. Since the 1960s he has authored or co-authored 20 books and more than 300 articles on variation in American English. He was an active participant in the 1996 debate surrounding the Oakland Ebonics controversy, supporting the legitimacy of African American English as a systematic language system. In addition to African American English, Wolfram has written extensively about Appalachian English, Puerto Rican English, Lumbee English, and on many dialects of North Carolina, particularly of rural, isolated communities such as Ocracoke Island.
Wolfram received his B.A. from Wheaton College in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1969, studying under Roger Shuy. He has been on the faculty at Georgetown University, the University of the District of Columbia, was the Director of Research at the Center for Applied Linguistics from 1980 to 1992, and in 1992 was named the first William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University. Wolfram is former President of the Linguistic Society of America as well as the American Dialect Society. In 2008, he was honored with the prestigious John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2010, he was awarded the Linguistics, Language and the Public award by the Linguistic Society of America. In 2013, he was awarded the North Carolina Award, the highest award given to a North Carolina citizen. Wolfram's book with Jeffrey Reaser, Talkin' Tar Heel: How our Voices Tell the Story of Story of North Carolina (2014 UNC Press), was the first popular linguistics book to embed more than 100 video and audio clips through the use of QRs.
In 1993, Wolfram formulated the principle of linguistic gratuity, which states that "investigators who have obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community should actively pursue ways in which they can return linguistic favors to the community". He directs the North Carolina Language and Life project at North Carolina State University. He has been involved in the production of television documentaries on dialect diversity (often in collaboration with Neal Hutcheson), the construction of museum exhibits, and the development of dialect awareness curricula for the schools and general public.
Wolfram received his B.A. from Wheaton College in 1963 and his Ph.D. from Hartford Seminary Foundation in 1969, studying under Roger Shuy. He has been on the faculty at Georgetown University, the University of the District of Columbia, was the Director of Research at the Center for Applied Linguistics from 1980 to 1992, and in 1992 was named the first William C. Friday Distinguished University Professor of English Linguistics at North Carolina State University. Wolfram is former President of the Linguistic Society of America as well as the American Dialect Society. In 2008, he was honored with the prestigious John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities from the North Carolina Humanities Council, a statewide nonprofit and affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2010, he was awarded the Linguistics, Language and the Public award by the Linguistic Society of America. In 2013, he was awarded the North Carolina Award, the highest award given to a North Carolina citizen. Wolfram's book with Jeffrey Reaser, Talkin' Tar Heel: How our Voices Tell the Story of Story of North Carolina (2014 UNC Press), was the first popular linguistics book to embed more than 100 video and audio clips through the use of QRs.
In 1993, Wolfram formulated the principle of linguistic gratuity, which states that "investigators who have obtained linguistic data from members of a speech community should actively pursue ways in which they can return linguistic favors to the community". He directs the North Carolina Language and Life project at North Carolina State University. He has been involved in the production of television documentaries on dialect diversity (often in collaboration with Neal Hutcheson), the construction of museum exhibits, and the development of dialect awareness curricula for the schools and general public.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
April 17, 2015
My father used to tell me, “I swanny Will if you don’t stop scaring your sister with that Admiral Akbar mask, I am going to tear it half in two!” Well the mask (I had won it in a Return of the Jedi coloring contest at the mall) was eventually torn half in two. And according to the book I just finished reading , Talking Tarheel (2014) by Walt Wolfram and Jeffrey Reaser, the word swanny is a word found in the rural Piedmont dialect of North Carolina (it doesn’t say anything about half in two though).
The book concerns North Carolina’s regional dialects and I found it to be informative and engaging but also quite innovative in its addition of QR codes that allows you to access video and audio examples of dialects all over North Carolina (check out the audio-visual links here). The authors, professors of English at NC State, separated the state into 6 major dialect areas: Appalachian, NC Piedmont, Coastal Plain, Tidewater and Outer Banks. But there are also other dialects and languages within those areas, including: African American, Lumbee, Cherokee and Latino.
Their detailed research has revealed some new revelations in the mosaic of dialects that we are fortunate to have in our state. One interesting finding is how varied African American Dialects are in NC, which are sometimes viewed as a monolith in “white” America. But there are some surprising speechways from the rural to the urban and from the Outer Banks to the Appalachians, and many are far removed from the urban dialect portrayed in popular culture.
The authors also try to dispel the myth that the Appalachian and Outer Banks vernacular is some sort of Elizabethan English time bubble. It turns out that their English is as living and mutable as any dialect, their isolation has just allowed a few words and grammatical structures to survive where in other, more connected, areas it has died out. If you read my review of John McWhorter’s book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, you will have already read about some antediluvian grammar that still lives on in NC, ie. “Mary is a singing.” Also, one of my favorite examples of how the Outer Banks vernacular has been evolving is their use of the word “dingbatters” for tourists. They picked up that word from watching Archie Bunker on the TV sitcom All in the Family. However, I do have a beef, I have read a hantle (a lot) of literature about the Scots Irish dialect of the Carolinas (esp. From Ulster to America by Michael Montgomery, who is probably the leading expert in Scots Irish speech ways and Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher), and as an armchair linguist who took one undergraduate linguistics class, I don’t think the authors emphasized the impact Scots Irish had on the Piedmont and Appalachian dialect regions enough. There are hundreds of words that came out of their distinct dialect that has examples in writings from Ulster (also lowland Scotland and the English border) and their diaspora in America. Examples of Scots Irish words that have occurred in Ulster and America: jouk- dodge, fornest-next to, lowp-jump, hantle- a lot. But in their defense the researchers for the most part adhered to the results of their own research.
But the part I found most interesting is the chapter on the legacy of American Indian Languages. Unfortunately, the only language remaining out of the six American Indian Language families that were historically found in NC is Cherokee, and presently there are only 200 to 300 fluent speakers of the language left in North Carolina. But there is another American Indian tribe living in NC that is the ninth largest tribe in the United States and is the largest non-reservation tribe in the US and they are the Lumbee tribe of Robeson County. This enigmatic tribe lost their language (or languages) sometime in the 1700’s but they speak a dialect of English that is as singular as the one found in the Appalachians or the Outer Banks and I am going to cover them in depth in another blog post.
The authors end the book covering the great Latino migration into North Carolina and the cultural and language ways that they are adding to our mostly monolingual state. Drawn to our manufacturing and agricultural job opportunities, North Carolina is now third in it the nation for numbers of rural Latinos and number one in monolingual Spanish speakers. Also, ten percent of Mexican immigrants speak an indigenous language and some of them do not speak Spanish as their first language but Otomi, Mixtec, Nahuas, Purhepechas, or Triques. However, only half of the Latinos in NC are from Mexico, the other half are from El Salvador, Panama, Guatemala or any other Central or even South American nation (my sister-in-law is Peruvian and lives in NC). The term most commonly used for Spanish speakers by Anglos in NC is Hispanic which is also the most used term on the East coast, but in the West they use the term Latino. Hispanic was found to be the most disliked phrase among Latinos because it was wholly created by the US Census and is considered a “white person’s” word. Lastly, the researchers have found that many bilingual children of Latino immigrants speak with a rural southern accent but with a distinctly Latino rhythm adding a beautiful new dialect to the already diverse speechways of our state.
Wolfram and Reaser view North Carolina’s richly diverse language quilt as one our most important resources. Although dialects change and die-out, the authors believe that there will not come a time when all Americans or North Carolinians speak alike. They seek to document the language and history of North Carolinians from the ones who were here at the founding to the more recent arrivals.
Also investigate this article: What linguists say about Kevin Spacey’s bizarre Southern accent on House of Cards
In the show House of Cards, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is from Gaffney, SC, a town that has a very similar culture and accent to my hometown of Gastonia, NC by virtue of them both sitting on the I-85 textile corridor about 30 miles apart. I can tell you that I never met anybody that dropped their “r’s” there like the Frank Underwood character does, if anything they added more “r’s”. Well that is not exactly true my best friend’s mother and father dropped their “r’s” but they were from the Lowcountry of South Carolina and they stood out. One of our favorite pastimes was to imitate his mother, “Da-vid, don’t you duhty up my kitchin.”
The book concerns North Carolina’s regional dialects and I found it to be informative and engaging but also quite innovative in its addition of QR codes that allows you to access video and audio examples of dialects all over North Carolina (check out the audio-visual links here). The authors, professors of English at NC State, separated the state into 6 major dialect areas: Appalachian, NC Piedmont, Coastal Plain, Tidewater and Outer Banks. But there are also other dialects and languages within those areas, including: African American, Lumbee, Cherokee and Latino.
Their detailed research has revealed some new revelations in the mosaic of dialects that we are fortunate to have in our state. One interesting finding is how varied African American Dialects are in NC, which are sometimes viewed as a monolith in “white” America. But there are some surprising speechways from the rural to the urban and from the Outer Banks to the Appalachians, and many are far removed from the urban dialect portrayed in popular culture.
The authors also try to dispel the myth that the Appalachian and Outer Banks vernacular is some sort of Elizabethan English time bubble. It turns out that their English is as living and mutable as any dialect, their isolation has just allowed a few words and grammatical structures to survive where in other, more connected, areas it has died out. If you read my review of John McWhorter’s book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, you will have already read about some antediluvian grammar that still lives on in NC, ie. “Mary is a singing.” Also, one of my favorite examples of how the Outer Banks vernacular has been evolving is their use of the word “dingbatters” for tourists. They picked up that word from watching Archie Bunker on the TV sitcom All in the Family. However, I do have a beef, I have read a hantle (a lot) of literature about the Scots Irish dialect of the Carolinas (esp. From Ulster to America by Michael Montgomery, who is probably the leading expert in Scots Irish speech ways and Albion’s Seed by David Hackett Fisher), and as an armchair linguist who took one undergraduate linguistics class, I don’t think the authors emphasized the impact Scots Irish had on the Piedmont and Appalachian dialect regions enough. There are hundreds of words that came out of their distinct dialect that has examples in writings from Ulster (also lowland Scotland and the English border) and their diaspora in America. Examples of Scots Irish words that have occurred in Ulster and America: jouk- dodge, fornest-next to, lowp-jump, hantle- a lot. But in their defense the researchers for the most part adhered to the results of their own research.
But the part I found most interesting is the chapter on the legacy of American Indian Languages. Unfortunately, the only language remaining out of the six American Indian Language families that were historically found in NC is Cherokee, and presently there are only 200 to 300 fluent speakers of the language left in North Carolina. But there is another American Indian tribe living in NC that is the ninth largest tribe in the United States and is the largest non-reservation tribe in the US and they are the Lumbee tribe of Robeson County. This enigmatic tribe lost their language (or languages) sometime in the 1700’s but they speak a dialect of English that is as singular as the one found in the Appalachians or the Outer Banks and I am going to cover them in depth in another blog post.
The authors end the book covering the great Latino migration into North Carolina and the cultural and language ways that they are adding to our mostly monolingual state. Drawn to our manufacturing and agricultural job opportunities, North Carolina is now third in it the nation for numbers of rural Latinos and number one in monolingual Spanish speakers. Also, ten percent of Mexican immigrants speak an indigenous language and some of them do not speak Spanish as their first language but Otomi, Mixtec, Nahuas, Purhepechas, or Triques. However, only half of the Latinos in NC are from Mexico, the other half are from El Salvador, Panama, Guatemala or any other Central or even South American nation (my sister-in-law is Peruvian and lives in NC). The term most commonly used for Spanish speakers by Anglos in NC is Hispanic which is also the most used term on the East coast, but in the West they use the term Latino. Hispanic was found to be the most disliked phrase among Latinos because it was wholly created by the US Census and is considered a “white person’s” word. Lastly, the researchers have found that many bilingual children of Latino immigrants speak with a rural southern accent but with a distinctly Latino rhythm adding a beautiful new dialect to the already diverse speechways of our state.
Wolfram and Reaser view North Carolina’s richly diverse language quilt as one our most important resources. Although dialects change and die-out, the authors believe that there will not come a time when all Americans or North Carolinians speak alike. They seek to document the language and history of North Carolinians from the ones who were here at the founding to the more recent arrivals.
Also investigate this article: What linguists say about Kevin Spacey’s bizarre Southern accent on House of Cards
In the show House of Cards, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) is from Gaffney, SC, a town that has a very similar culture and accent to my hometown of Gastonia, NC by virtue of them both sitting on the I-85 textile corridor about 30 miles apart. I can tell you that I never met anybody that dropped their “r’s” there like the Frank Underwood character does, if anything they added more “r’s”. Well that is not exactly true my best friend’s mother and father dropped their “r’s” but they were from the Lowcountry of South Carolina and they stood out. One of our favorite pastimes was to imitate his mother, “Da-vid, don’t you duhty up my kitchin.”
sony-or-android
December 13, 2019sometime in 2020 (?) Wolfram is apparently coming out with a new & better book....
September 22, 2017
3.5, maybe 3.75
This appealed to my inner geek, the one that enjoys dialect and regional idioms. I'd heard of Dr. Wolfram's work before, so knew his interest in researching, documenting, and preserving dialect.
This book promptly refutes that old chestnut about speakers of the NC Outer Banks and Appalachia speaking a Shakespearean speech, something that I always thought fairly ridiculous even in theory. Also of interest were chapters on the Latino/Hispanic influence on regional speech (and vice versa) and the changes in African American Urban dialect within the state. The book can be a repetitive in places, and there is the bad habit of "reiterating the reiterations" at the end of chapters. (Just read it, thanks, so I know what it said. I realize it's suppoed to be a wrap-up, but it got a little tedious after a while.) Other than that, lots of interesting information. I'd love to find similar books on other areas of the country.
This appealed to my inner geek, the one that enjoys dialect and regional idioms. I'd heard of Dr. Wolfram's work before, so knew his interest in researching, documenting, and preserving dialect.
This book promptly refutes that old chestnut about speakers of the NC Outer Banks and Appalachia speaking a Shakespearean speech, something that I always thought fairly ridiculous even in theory. Also of interest were chapters on the Latino/Hispanic influence on regional speech (and vice versa) and the changes in African American Urban dialect within the state. The book can be a repetitive in places, and there is the bad habit of "reiterating the reiterations" at the end of chapters. (Just read it, thanks, so I know what it said. I realize it's suppoed to be a wrap-up, but it got a little tedious after a while.) Other than that, lots of interesting information. I'd love to find similar books on other areas of the country.
June 17, 2022
I mentioned at work that my dream is to somehow spend more time at the beach.
And that our two favorite beaches are Ocracoke and Oak Island.
So my coworker suggested I read "Hoi Toide" which documents the language of Ocracoke and all its flavor.
However, I found this book instead!
If you are a "language reflects history" type of person, this is for you.
This book, I skimmed. It's written for a linguistics crew for sure but I still got a TON out of it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CZmQuGPrA...
And that our two favorite beaches are Ocracoke and Oak Island.
So my coworker suggested I read "Hoi Toide" which documents the language of Ocracoke and all its flavor.
However, I found this book instead!
If you are a "language reflects history" type of person, this is for you.
This book, I skimmed. It's written for a linguistics crew for sure but I still got a TON out of it.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CZmQuGPrA...
April 26, 2020
I bought this book while I was planning a move to North Carolina. This is probably a really good book but I could barely finish (I finished out of guilt). I found this book to be written for those interested in ,and with some academic background in, linguistic. That being said, I did learn some things that has made my experience listening to Tar Heel that much richer.
May 24, 2020
A lovely portrait of the variety of voices of NC. Written in an accessible style for lay readers (though as a linguist, I wished for something a bit more technical). Provided thorough histories for dialects and their speakers as well as examples of current use.
March 25, 2021
If you're a linguist you've got to love Walt Wolfram (okay, you don't have to ). I love the use of QR codes in this book. It's an essential read for anyone interested in dialects and accents.
June 21, 2022
Fantastic study of the various dialects and speech patterns from North Carolina
January 15, 2015
A little more academic that I was expecting. The links to recordings of the various speakers is a neat feature, but also distracting - I don't want to be computer-ing while I'm book-ing. Still, a lot of interesting information, history, and science; it was just lacking in presentation.
January 3, 2015
Interesting look at NC dialects.
January 21, 2016
As someone that has left his native state and still being remarked on my accent and idioms, this was a fascinating read. It made more more proud to be a son of the Tarheel State
Read
June 30, 2016Didn't read. Too tedious.
September 26, 2015
Educational and an interesting read. Linguistics is cool.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews