In a lesser-known operation that presaged the horrors of the deadly Battle of Hürtgen Forest, the XIX Corps broke through the Siegfried Line north of Aachen, Germany, in October 1944.

After the Allied breakout during Operation Cobra in late July 1944, the previously static situation in Normandy exploded into a rapid pursuit of the routed German troops. With Paris liberated and Brittany secured, the Allies looked to the east, beyond the Roer and Rhine Rivers to the German frontier. Optimistic that the war could end before the new year, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered offensive operations all along the front line, which stretched from the English Channel to the Mediterranean Sea.

The Allies soon found that the logistic infrastructure could not sustain the speed of their advance. Planners expected before D-Day that the beachhead would expand gradually to the east as the troops fought their way off the beaches and through France. The complex hedgerow terrain frustrated these plans, however, limiting the Allied advance to yards per day. When the breakout finally took place at Saint-Lô on July 25, the front moved so rapidly that logisticians could not repair rail lines, roads, or pipelines quickly enough to keep pace. The lack of a functioning port along the Atlantic coast only made the situation worse.

Pursuit to the German border. US Army Center of Military History.

Still, in September 1944 the situation favored the Allies, who advanced steadily, if slowly, in the face of hasty counterattacks conducted by badly understrength Wehrmacht units. By late September, however, the logistic situation grew critical, dispersal of forces made Allied attacks ineffectual, and the enemy began to recover. As the pace of the Allied advance slowed, the Wehrmacht prepared a powerful defense along the Siegfried Line, known to the Germans as the “West Wall.” This was the last line of defense standing between the Allies and the German frontier.

With fresh troops bolstering the defense of Aachen and a VII Corps attack south of the city stalled by a tenacious defense, Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, commander of the First US Army, ordered a pause on September 22, halting offensive operations through the end of the month. The pause would give him time to reorganize his troops and develop a plan to resume the offensive in early October. To help in this effort, Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group, ordered Lieutenant General William H. Simpson’s Ninth US Army to move from Brittany, France, into the line, taking up a position between the Third US Army to the south and First Army to the north. This shortened the First Army front, enabling Hodges to concentrate forces for a renewed offensive into the Aachen Gap, a stretch of armor-friendly terrain just north of Aachen, Germany.

Major General Raymond S. McLain, XIX Corps Commander. Photo: ibiblio.org

Hodges ordered Major General Raymond S. McLain, commander of XIX Corps, to prepare for the offensive. The 30th Infantry Division, commanded by Major General Leland Hobbs, would spearhead the attack along a 14-mile front stretching from Geilenkirchen in the north to Aachen in the south. Hobbs’s troops would drive east to the Roer River and then south to Aachen, reducing the Siegfried Line, clearing the area of German troops, and linking up with the 1st Infantry Division on the northern edge of Aachen. The 117th and 119th Infantry Regiments would lead the attack, fighting abreast, with the 120th in reserve. The 29th Infantry Division, recently returned to XIX Corps command after the liberation of Brest, would secure the corps’ left flank during the offensive.

Major General Leland S. Hobbs, commander of the 30th Infantry Division. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

The Siegfried Line was a formidable series of obstacles intended to bolster the defense along the German border. Defending forces, protected by steel-reinforced concrete pillboxes, trenches, and other fortifications, overwatched these obstacles. Never intended to stop an attacker on their own, the Siegfried Line increased the defender’s survivability while slowing down attacking troops, increasing their exposure to machine gun, artillery, and antitank gun fire. Once they assessed that the attacker was weakened sufficiently, the Germans would inevitably counterattack.

30th Infantry Division zone of attack. Leland Hobbs, “Breaching the Siegfried Line,” Military Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, June 1946

The Siegfried Line supplemented the natural defensive characteristics of the terrain. In the 30th Infantry Division sector, which consisted of relatively open terrain, the Wurm River presented the first natural obstacle. The Wurm was 30 feet across, with steep, muddy banks on either side, making it impassible to armor without combat engineer bridging support. Only a small portion of the line just north of Aachen lacked this water obstacle, so here the defensive belt included the only dragon’s teeth in the XIX Corps sector. Just to the east, a parallel railroad line ran through the Wurm River valley, further complicating the terrain. Finally, the center of the 30th Division sector featured a castle with a moat, situated in dense forest on hilly terrain. The Siegfried Line, three kilometers thick and dense with pillboxes, backed up these natural defenses.

Dragon’s teeth, one of the most recognizable obstacles used in the Siegfried Line, near Wissembourg, France. Courtesy The National WWII Museum

The Germans built the Siegfried Line from 1939–40, so they designed the pillboxes around the most prevalent weapons of that time: the machine gun and the underpowered 37 mm antitank gun. This meant the pillboxes were too small to house more modern weapons like the feared 88 mm antitank gun. Still, they presented a serious challenge to the enemy, supplementing the trenches, foxholes, minefields, and antitank obstacles making up the defense.

To prepare, Hobbs rotated his troops out of the line in the period preceding the attack so that they could conduct training. Planners built a large terrain model—a detailed representation of the terrain and the obstacle belt—with each pillbox in its confirmed location. Soldiers prepared diligently, learning how to spot concealed or disguised pillboxes, and practicing detailed procedures for reducing them. This training was essential, enabling the GIs to react instinctively to the demands of the mission.

Plan view of a typical Siegfried Line pillbox. XIX Corps, US Army, “Breaching the Siegfried Line,” 12 January 1945, Combined Arms Research Library, Call Number N-7623.

Both field artillery preparatory fires and an aerial bombardment preceded the attack. Beginning on September 26, the 258th Field Artillery Battalion’s M12 155 mm self-propelled guns pummeled the German fortifications daily. Unfortunately, post-battle damage assessment revealed that only the 155 mm or 8-inch howitzer could penetrate the reinforced concrete pillboxes, and they could do so only after scoring three to five direct hits. Artillery proved effective mostly in forcing German defenders to remain in their pillboxes, or in causing the surrender of the demoralized occupants of a pillbox who experienced a direct hit. Therefore, after nearly a week of artillery bombardment, most of the fortifications remained intact.

Camouflaged German pillbox. XIX Corps, US Army, “Breaching the Siegfried Line,” 12 January 1945, Combined Arms Research Library, Call Number N-7623.

On the morning of the attack, October 2, the focus of the artillery shifted to counter-antiaircraft (AA) fire in support of the aerial bombardment. The guns of both the XIX and VII Corps artillery targeted AA positions, their precise locations confirmed by aerial reconnaissance. These fire missions were highly effective at suppressing or destroying the AA batteries, resulting in zero losses of Allied planes. The results of the aerial bombardment were less impressive, however. Most of the medium bombers approached the target area from the west, rather than from the southwest, as intended. This created confusion among the bombardiers, most of whom did not release their loads. The fighter bombers dropped napalm on the pillboxes, aided by the placement of red smoke near their targets, but this, too, had limited effect. It would be up to the infantry and their supporting arms to reduce the fortifications in close combat.

XIX Corps Breaks Through the West Wall, 2–7 October 1944. US Army Center of Military History.

The infantry assault began at 1100, with the 117th Infantry in the north and the 119th in the south. The GIs of the 117th rushed down the hill to the Wurm River under a hail of German small arms, mortar, and artillery fire. Engineers threw specially constructed footbridges across the river in minutes, allowing the infantry to sustain its momentum, minimizing the troops’ exposure to fire. Supported by self-propelled 155 mm artillery, the infantry began the work of reducing pillboxes. By the end of the day, the 117th reached Palenberg, its objective for the day, having reduced 11 pillboxes, without armor support, at the cost of 227 casualties.

The 30th Infantry Division intelligence officer reported after the battle that the pillboxes were:

“in clusters, all inter-supporting and sited to cover each other by fire. But due to the limited traverse of their fields of fire, there seemed to always be one at least in a group, which, if reduced, permitted our men to start a circuit of the remaining pillboxes, using approaches to each succeeding one that could not be covered by fire of the remaining ones. The problem of course, was to discover the key pillbox to each cluster.[1]“

For the 117th, attacking fortifications in the open, this was a relatively easy task. The 119th faced a tougher challenge, attacking up a steep slope into dense forest that was too damp to ignite with napalm. The trees made detection of pillboxes and enemy movement challenging, while making American artillery fire ineffective against the pillboxes. This forced the infantry to attempt a frontal assault into the forest, but German artillery intensified, with aerial bursts exploding in the treetops, creating deadly wooden splinters and making it impossible to install a bridge over the Wurm. The Rimburg Castle, surrounded by minefields and a moat and supported by observation posts on the high ground, further complicated the situation

Rimburg Castle, moat visible in the foreground. XIX Corps, US Army, “Breaching the Siegfried Line,” 12 January 1945, Combined Arms Research Library, Call Number N-7623.

As the XIX Corps reported in its after-action report, “The mission of the 119th in breaching the Siegfried Line soon boiled down to the job of effecting a penetration of the woods, and then cleaning out the enemy . . . after close-in fighting with opposing lines rarely getting further apart than twenty-five to fifty yards.”[2] This delayed the 119th Infantry’s advance while greatly limiting the effectiveness of their artillery and armor support.

The 2nd Armored Division crossed the Wurm and joined the fight in the northern part of the corps sector on the morning of October 3. Predictably, the relatively open terrain enabled rapid movement of the tanks, which proved mostly impervious even to the most intense artillery fire. By the end of the day, armored elements pushed through and cleared the town of Ubach. German counterattacks began the next day, but despite experiencing the most intense artillery bombardments of the war up to that point, the infantry with their supporting armor beat back these attacks. Meanwhile, the 119th Infantry cleared the Rimburg Castle by the evening of  October 3, pushing south of the castle to the railroad on the 4th.

With the 117th Infantry’s zone mostly cleared, on October 5 the focus of the attack shifted to the southeast. The 119th Infantry, reinforced by the 3rd Battalion, 120th Infantry, gradually pushed south through the woods. At 1330, Combat Command A of the 2nd Armored Division crossed the Wurm and passed through the 117th, rapidly extending the American lines to the east. The Germans launched their most powerful counterattacks on the morning of October 6, recapturing four pillboxes and forcing the 2nd Battalion, 119th Infantry, to retreat 800 yards with significant casualties. By nightfall, however, the infantry regained their initial positions as German resistance crumbled, although fighting continued until October 16, when the 30th Infantry Division made contact with the 1st Infantry Division just northeast of Aachen.

As noted in its after-action report, by October 16 the XIX Corps had destroyed the enemy positions of the Siegfried Line in their 14-mile-wide zone of attack, penetrating to a depth of six miles. Success was costly, however, especially in the south, where the 119th and 120th Infantry suffered about twice as many casualties as the 117th. Post-battle analysis revealed the difficulty of clearing the densely wooded terrain in the southern part of the corps sector. This should have informed planning for future operations, but it did not stop the Americans from attacking into the strongest portions of the Siegfried Line in the coming weeks.

Historians have argued that the Allies should have remained in the defense south of Aachen and mounted an offensive through the Aachen Gap. This would have sidestepped the Hürtgen Forest—with terrain much like that faced by the 119th and 120th Infantry—avoiding one of America’s longest and most costly battles of the war. The logic of Eisenhower’s broad front strategy, however, required Allied attacks to continue all along the line. Though intended to destroy the German army west of the Rhine River, this attritional strategy also increased Allied casualties and possibly delayed victory in the European theater for months.

ADDITIONAL READING:

Robert W. Baumer, Old Hickory: The 30th Division, the Top-Rated American Infantry Division in Europe in World War II, Lanham, MD: Stackpole, 2017.

XIX Corps, US Army, “Breaching the Siegfried Line,” 12 January 1945, Combined Arms Research Library, Call Number N-7623

CONTRIBUTOR

Dr. Mark T. Calhoun

Dr. Mark T. Calhoun is the Military Historian at the Jenny Craig Institute for the Study of War and Democracy.

But it might not be that way for much longer.

BY DAN NOSOWITZDECEMBER 11, 2019

Why North Carolina Is the Most Linguistically Diverse U.S. State

North Carolina’s geographic diversity, from the Appalachians to the Outer Banks, helps explain its linguistic diversity. SKIP NALL / GETTY IMAGES; ZACH FRAILEY / GETTY IMAGES

In This Story

DESTINATION GUIDE

North Carolina

28 Articles

181 Places

WALT WOLFRAM GREW UP IN a city so linguistically fascinating that the first time he met Bill Labov, the godfather of American sociolinguistics, Labov simply cornered him and made him say different words. Yet he left his native Philadelphia for a teaching job elsewhere—a place of even greater linguistic intrigue. “I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, Wolfram says, “to die and come to dialect heaven.”

Wolfram is coauthor of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, an examination of his adopted home, where he works at North Carolina State University (alongside his coauthor Jeffrey Reaser). He also happens to be one of the great American linguists of the past 50 years, with a specialty in ethnic and regional American English dialects. He has been a central figure in getting stigmatized dialects, such as African-American English and Appalachian English, recognized as legitimate language systems.

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Wolfram has called North Carolina the most linguistically diverse state in the country, but that diversity is waning. The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH has gone through several sweeping changes in a relatively short period of time. But first, a little housekeeping—distinguishing an “accent” from a “dialect.” An accent is composed purely of pronunciation changes, almost always vowel sounds. Dialects, on the other hand, incorporate all kinds of other stuff, including vocabulary, structure, syntax, idioms, and tenses. The South has various species of both.

Before the Civil War, white Southeasterners did not seem to have spoken in what would be a recognizably Southern accent by modern standards. (There is some debate over this, but a 1997 study of uncovered interviews with Civil War veterans has become a major data point in Southern English history analysis, and indicates that this is true.) There were differences in the way people talked, but it wasn’t split as evenly along North/South lines as one would think. Southerners then, for example, seem to have had what’s called the “coil-curl merger,” which makes the “oy” and “er” sounds very similar. Think of calling a toilet a “terlet.” But that merger is also associated with an extremely non-Southern place: New York City and its old “Thoity-Thoid Street” accent.

Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) “The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,” says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.

In Southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, regional dialects sprung up seemingly overnight, influenced by a combination of factors including the destruction of infrastructure, the panic of Reconstruction, lesser-known stuff like the boll weevil crisis, and the general fact that regional accents tend to be strongest among the poorest people. In the post–Civil War period, Southerners left the South en masse; the ones who stayed were often the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, and often the keepers of the strongest regional accents. A lack of migration into the South, either from the North or internationally, allowed its regional accents to bloom in relative isolation.

This period of the South’s history spawned dozens of distinct dialects and accents, especially in the Atlantic states. World War II then began a series of events that pushed against these regional accents. Oil drilling, manufacturing, retirement communities, and military bases brought Northerners and wealth down to the South. “There’s been a lot of dialect leveling, that’s what linguists call it,” says Erik Thomas, a linguist at North Carolina State who often works on regional and minority speech.

When regional accents get leveled, they end up losing many of their distinctive elements—and essentially begin to sound more like one another. This is why old people from the South, especially anyone born before around 1930, sound different from young Southerners: They maintain at least the vestiges of the rich tapestry of Southern dialects. That’s all dying now. But it’s dying a little bit more slowly in some places than in others.

NORTH CAROLINA STANDS OUT AMONG Southern states for its tremendous geographic diversity. East of the Mississippi, there aren’t that many states with a substantial mountain range, a large plateau, and a long, island-pocked coastline. The ones that do, like New York, tend to exhibit an awful lot of different regional linguistic differences. And west of the Mississippi, there aren’t nearly as many of these differences among geographic regions within states.

There were many distinct regional accents or dialects in the pre–Civil War South, but some were more widespread (and better-known to modern linguists) than others. These include the Lowcountry accent near Charleston, South Carolina; the Appalachian accent, which ranges from Pennsylvania down to Georgia; the Plantation or Black Belt region, home to the richest soil and the highest numbers of slaves; the Cajun and Creole dialects of Louisiana; and the aristocratic Tidewater accent of Eastern Virginia.

North Carolina, smack in the middle of the Atlantic South, found more of those dialects within its borders than any other state. On top of that, North Carolina is home to a dialect found nowhere else in the world: the English spoken by those in the Pamlico Sound region, the coastal area that includes the Outer Banks.

Only a few generations ago, you could find an Appalachian speaker in the mountains of the west, a Tidewater speaker in the counties bordering Virginia, a Black Belt speaker in the eastern lowlands, and a Pamlico Sound speaker out on Ocracoke and Harkers Island, all without leaving the state.

These are dramatically different ways of speaking. Frankly, it would take too long to get into what makes them unique, but it’s easy enough to hash out a few of the best-known distinguishing features. Appalachian English often shows “a-prefixing,” as in “a-hunting and a-fishing.” The South in general tends to do what’s called a monophthongization of the long “i” sound. This turns vowels that are normally made up of two sounds—the vowel in a word like “spied” contains both “ah” and “ee”—and compresses them into one sound. Take these two words: “tight” and “tie.” In most of the South, that vowel sound is more like “ah” in the latter word. In Appalachia, it’s that way in both.

The Tidewater accent, a sort of upper-crust way of speaking, is best known for turning the vowel sound in “out” into “oo.” It is weirdly similar to the Canadian “oot and aboot,” though the southern Virginians and northern North Carolinians seem to have developed that on their own. They also have historically used the word “boot” for a car’s trunk and, amazingly, Wolfram says that one developed independently from the British, too. There are a couple of theories as to where “boot” in that use came from, but Wolfram suggests one in particular: that the storage for pre-car carriages was on the floor, next to a rider’s boots. Eventually any vehicle storage space came to be called a boot. Whether you’re in England or on the Virginia-North Carolina border, the nickname just makes sense.

The Black Belt accent is most similar to the Lowcountry accent of South Carolina. It’s known for British-y vowel sounds; “bath” gets more of an “ah” sound. It’s also a non-rhotic accent, meaning the “r” sound is dropped after many vowels: A word like “year” sounds like “yee-ah” (sort of like what a native Bostonian would say). One of the great examples of this accent can be found in the speech of late senator Fritz Hollings.

Then we get to the Pamlico Sound accent and dialect, which is the way people speak on the islands and, sometimes, mainland Hyde County. “It’s the only dialect in the United States that people routinely think is not an American dialect,” says Wolfram. The long “i” is changed, but not to a monophthong “ah,” as it is in the rest of the South. Instead it’s “oy,” which gives the people of Ocracoke and nearby islands their nickname: Hoi Toiders.

The speech of the Hoi Toiders sounds, upon first listen, closer to a Cockney or rural Australian accent than anything else in the South. It’s chock full of stuff that’s totally unlike any other American accent. “Fish” becomes “feesh.” The vowel in a word like “down” turns the word into something more like “deh-een.”

The vocabulary is also rife with local terminology. Vocabulary is not necessarily something linguists look at as a differentiating factor among accents and dialects, as unique words and descriptions pop into being and fade like fireflies, and aren’t always reflective of larger linguistic differences. But the Hoi Toiders have so many, and they’re so weird and cool, that linguists like Wolfram make sure to note them. These often come from the sea, as the life of a Hoi Toider revolves around boats, fishing, and marine weather.

“Mommucked” means to be extremely frustrated. A porch is a “pizer.” “Whopperjawed” means something is out of true. A “dingbatter” is a mainlander. And lest you think that all of these terms are straight out of Shakespearean English, that one comes from the early 1970s. Television first came to Ocracoke in 1972, when the show All in the Family was a huge hit. Archie Bunker used to call his wife, Edith, a dingbat, and the term ended up in wide use on Ocracoke to refer to the many tourists who didn’t know their port from their starboard.

These are all white accents, and North Carolina is, of course, not all white. The state is about 23 percent black and 15 percent Latinx, and has the sixth largest Native American population of any state in the country.

The idea that there are regional African-American dialects is actually sort of new to linguistics, likely due to the fact that the field has long been dominated by white, and often Northern, men. Hell, it’s really only in the past couple of decades that linguists have studied African-American English as a dialect, rather than as an incorrect or broken form of “standard,” white American English. There was, and often still is, an assumption among linguists that there is a homogeneous African-American English. Really though, there are simply some core African-American language features that span the country, and regional variations on those.

In any case, African-American North Carolinians seem to have a geographic division of dialects and accents, too. This video shows a substantial difference in vowel sounds between Appalachian and coastal speech, with coastal speech having some, but not all, of the Hoi Toider accent. Wolfram conducted experiments that found that listeners usually could not distinguish between old North Carolinians, regardless of race. Those same listeners, though, easily distinguished younger white from younger black North Carolinians, which is generally the case nationally as well. As with the other regional Southern accents, black North Carolinians are experiencing leveling. As white North Carolinians level to a way of speaking more like the rest of the white South, black North Carolinians are leveling to the black South.

A forthcoming book from Wolfram and Mary Kohn looks at regionality in African-American English, often using North Carolina as a base, and finds empirical differences by region. But there are so many other variables in African-American English: geographic region, urban versus rural, the stigmatization of black speech by whites, class differences, demographics—all kinds of stuff. It’s very complicated, and linguists are only now starting to try to unpack it.

The Latinx population in North Carolina is a more recent arrival, and faster-growing than any other non-white population in the state. The English spoken by native English speakers of Latin American descent in North Carolina is newish, but has the potential to become, or might already be, a distinct dialect. That long “i” sound in “spied” seems to be somewhere in between the sound in a Spanish word like “hay” and the flattened, monophthong “ah” of a white North Carolinian. There’s also a substantial overlap in language between Latinx and African-American populations in North Carolina, so Latinx speakers sometimes use what’s called the “habitual be,” as in “I be speaking.” It’s a form that indicates an ongoing action, and it’s heavily associated with African-American English. Latinx populations adopting African-American English features isn’t new, of course. It’s been well-documented in, just for example, the Puerto Rican population in New York City.

The Lumbee Indians make up the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, and mostly live in the eastern part of North Carolina. Wolfram has also studied Lumbee English, which sometimes has the Hoi Toider vowel change, but also comes with a series of vocabulary and grammatical distinctions. “Ellick” is a sweetened coffee, “juvember” is a slingshot, that kind of thing. What’s especially fascinating about the Lumbee population is that it’s so concentrated, which is extremely unusual for Native Americans in the Eastern United States. The small city of Pembroke is a whopping 90 percent Lumbee. That concentration functions as an isolating factor, and isolation is key for maintaining regional accents and dialects.

Basically, the Lumbee have sustained their regional accent in a much stronger enduring way than other populations. Ocracoke has a regional accent because it’s literally an island; Pembroke has one because it’s figuratively an island.

So North Carolina has a startling variety of American English dialects, including a couple found nowhere else. Yet, if you travel to North Carolina, there’s an extremely high chance that you won’t hear any of them.

NORTH CAROLINA HAS THE LINGUISTIC advantage of varied geography and a central location within the Southeast. But over the past 75 years or so, accents and dialects have been fading incredibly rapidly. Urbanization, an influx of new residents from other American regions and abroad, increased communication and national media, and improved infrastructure have all contributed to leveling throughout the South.

Today, the vast majority of the South sounds, largely, the same. The biggest split left is urban versus rural. Someone from rural Georgia sounds, for the most part, like someone from rural Texas, rural Tennessee, or rural Virginia. The cities sound like each other, too, and thanks to a greater flow of people, but then again Southern accents in cities have always been far weaker than those in the country. North Carolina is not exempt from any of this.

“The Southern-sounding accents have become more like each other, and in the cities they’re more like national norms,” says Thomas. The number of people speaking a Hoi Toider dialect on Ocracoke is down in the low hundreds. Good luck finding someone with a Tidewater accent who’s under 90 years old.

But a combination of geography, weather, and infrastructure have slowed dialect leveling in North Carolina a bit. “Before the 1920s, North Carolina had absolutely awful roads,” says Thomas. In the springtime, rains would turn the meager dirt roads into impassable mud pits. The Outer Banks relied on water transportation, isolating it from the mainland. Ocracoke still has no bridge. North Carolina’s Appalachian region is rugged and extreme, as distant from a major city as Appalachian West Virginia or Kentucky. That isolation has kept the local Appalachian English around, though it, too, is fading.

There are efforts to save endangered languages around the world, but dialects are generally left to mutate, merge, or disappear as part of the natural order of things. They are harder to get a hold of than distinct languages. Not all features are used by all speakers, the borders are fuzzy, the changes frequent.

“I’m one of the few people who says there’s no reason to exclude dialects from the endangerment canon, and there’s every reason to include them. They don’t much listen to me,” laughs Wolfram, who is trying his best to save or preserve the Pamlico Sound dialect. He has spent his spring break every year for the past 27 years teaching a class on it, on the island itself. “They’re interested,” he says, “but they’re not really saying they want to keep the dialect alive.”

Leveling has swept into the South like a tide. North Carolina has pockets that are hard for the water to reach, tidepools resistant to waves. But a roising toid is probably going to reach them, too.

You can join the conversation about this and other stories in the Atlas Obscura Community Forums.

But it might not be that way for much longer.

BY DAN NOSOWITZDECEMBER 11, 2019

Why North Carolina Is the Most Linguistically Diverse U.S. State

North Carolina’s geographic diversity, from the Appalachians to the Outer Banks, helps explain its linguistic diversity. SKIP NALL / GETTY IMAGES; ZACH FRAILEY / GETTY IMAGES

In This Story

DESTINATION GUIDE

North Carolina

28 Articles

181 Places

WALT WOLFRAM GREW UP IN a city so linguistically fascinating that the first time he met Bill Labov, the godfather of American sociolinguistics, Labov simply cornered him and made him say different words. Yet he left his native Philadelphia for a teaching job elsewhere—a place of even greater linguistic intrigue. “I got an offer I couldn’t refuse, Wolfram says, “to die and come to dialect heaven.”

Wolfram is coauthor of Talkin’ Tar Heel: How Our Voices Tell the Story of North Carolina, an examination of his adopted home, where he works at North Carolina State University (alongside his coauthor Jeffrey Reaser). He also happens to be one of the great American linguists of the past 50 years, with a specialty in ethnic and regional American English dialects. He has been a central figure in getting stigmatized dialects, such as African-American English and Appalachian English, recognized as legitimate language systems.

ATLAS OBSCURA COURSES

Learn with Us!

Check out our lineup of courses taught by world-class experts from around the world.See Courses

Wolfram has called North Carolina the most linguistically diverse state in the country, but that diversity is waning. The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

LANGUAGE IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH has gone through several sweeping changes in a relatively short period of time. But first, a little housekeeping—distinguishing an “accent” from a “dialect.” An accent is composed purely of pronunciation changes, almost always vowel sounds. Dialects, on the other hand, incorporate all kinds of other stuff, including vocabulary, structure, syntax, idioms, and tenses. The South has various species of both.

Before the Civil War, white Southeasterners did not seem to have spoken in what would be a recognizably Southern accent by modern standards. (There is some debate over this, but a 1997 study of uncovered interviews with Civil War veterans has become a major data point in Southern English history analysis, and indicates that this is true.) There were differences in the way people talked, but it wasn’t split as evenly along North/South lines as one would think. Southerners then, for example, seem to have had what’s called the “coil-curl merger,” which makes the “oy” and “er” sounds very similar. Think of calling a toilet a “terlet.” But that merger is also associated with an extremely non-Southern place: New York City and its old “Thoity-Thoid Street” accent.

Distinctly Southern dialects among the white population of the American South seem only to have taken hold starting around the time of the Civil War. (African-American and other minority dialects have their own histories, which will be addressed later.) “The things that we think are Southern today were embryonic in the South before the Civil War, but only took off afterwards,” says Wolfram. The period from the end of the Civil War until World War I—which seems like a long time, but is very condensed linguistically, less than three generations—saw an explosion of diversity in what are sometimes referred to as Older Southern American Accents.

In Southern states bordering the Atlantic Ocean, regional dialects sprung up seemingly overnight, influenced by a combination of factors including the destruction of infrastructure, the panic of Reconstruction, lesser-known stuff like the boll weevil crisis, and the general fact that regional accents tend to be strongest among the poorest people. In the post–Civil War period, Southerners left the South en masse; the ones who stayed were often the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, and often the keepers of the strongest regional accents. A lack of migration into the South, either from the North or internationally, allowed its regional accents to bloom in relative isolation.

This period of the South’s history spawned dozens of distinct dialects and accents, especially in the Atlantic states. World War II then began a series of events that pushed against these regional accents. Oil drilling, manufacturing, retirement communities, and military bases brought Northerners and wealth down to the South. “There’s been a lot of dialect leveling, that’s what linguists call it,” says Erik Thomas, a linguist at North Carolina State who often works on regional and minority speech.

When regional accents get leveled, they end up losing many of their distinctive elements—and essentially begin to sound more like one another. This is why old people from the South, especially anyone born before around 1930, sound different from young Southerners: They maintain at least the vestiges of the rich tapestry of Southern dialects. That’s all dying now. But it’s dying a little bit more slowly in some places than in others.

NORTH CAROLINA STANDS OUT AMONG Southern states for its tremendous geographic diversity. East of the Mississippi, there aren’t that many states with a substantial mountain range, a large plateau, and a long, island-pocked coastline. The ones that do, like New York, tend to exhibit an awful lot of different regional linguistic differences. And west of the Mississippi, there aren’t nearly as many of these differences among geographic regions within states.

There were many distinct regional accents or dialects in the pre–Civil War South, but some were more widespread (and better-known to modern linguists) than others. These include the Lowcountry accent near Charleston, South Carolina; the Appalachian accent, which ranges from Pennsylvania down to Georgia; the Plantation or Black Belt region, home to the richest soil and the highest numbers of slaves; the Cajun and Creole dialects of Louisiana; and the aristocratic Tidewater accent of Eastern Virginia.

North Carolina, smack in the middle of the Atlantic South, found more of those dialects within its borders than any other state. On top of that, North Carolina is home to a dialect found nowhere else in the world: the English spoken by those in the Pamlico Sound region, the coastal area that includes the Outer Banks.

Only a few generations ago, you could find an Appalachian speaker in the mountains of the west, a Tidewater speaker in the counties bordering Virginia, a Black Belt speaker in the eastern lowlands, and a Pamlico Sound speaker out on Ocracoke and Harkers Island, all without leaving the state.

These are dramatically different ways of speaking. Frankly, it would take too long to get into what makes them unique, but it’s easy enough to hash out a few of the best-known distinguishing features. Appalachian English often shows “a-prefixing,” as in “a-hunting and a-fishing.” The South in general tends to do what’s called a monophthongization of the long “i” sound. This turns vowels that are normally made up of two sounds—the vowel in a word like “spied” contains both “ah” and “ee”—and compresses them into one sound. Take these two words: “tight” and “tie.” In most of the South, that vowel sound is more like “ah” in the latter word. In Appalachia, it’s that way in both.

The Tidewater accent, a sort of upper-crust way of speaking, is best known for turning the vowel sound in “out” into “oo.” It is weirdly similar to the Canadian “oot and aboot,” though the southern Virginians and northern North Carolinians seem to have developed that on their own. They also have historically used the word “boot” for a car’s trunk and, amazingly, Wolfram says that one developed independently from the British, too. There are a couple of theories as to where “boot” in that use came from, but Wolfram suggests one in particular: that the storage for pre-car carriages was on the floor, next to a rider’s boots. Eventually any vehicle storage space came to be called a boot. Whether you’re in England or on the Virginia-North Carolina border, the nickname just makes sense.

The Black Belt accent is most similar to the Lowcountry accent of South Carolina. It’s known for British-y vowel sounds; “bath” gets more of an “ah” sound. It’s also a non-rhotic accent, meaning the “r” sound is dropped after many vowels: A word like “year” sounds like “yee-ah” (sort of like what a native Bostonian would say). One of the great examples of this accent can be found in the speech of late senator Fritz Hollings.

Then we get to the Pamlico Sound accent and dialect, which is the way people speak on the islands and, sometimes, mainland Hyde County. “It’s the only dialect in the United States that people routinely think is not an American dialect,” says Wolfram. The long “i” is changed, but not to a monophthong “ah,” as it is in the rest of the South. Instead it’s “oy,” which gives the people of Ocracoke and nearby islands their nickname: Hoi Toiders.

The speech of the Hoi Toiders sounds, upon first listen, closer to a Cockney or rural Australian accent than anything else in the South. It’s chock full of stuff that’s totally unlike any other American accent. “Fish” becomes “feesh.” The vowel in a word like “down” turns the word into something more like “deh-een.”

The vocabulary is also rife with local terminology. Vocabulary is not necessarily something linguists look at as a differentiating factor among accents and dialects, as unique words and descriptions pop into being and fade like fireflies, and aren’t always reflective of larger linguistic differences. But the Hoi Toiders have so many, and they’re so weird and cool, that linguists like Wolfram make sure to note them. These often come from the sea, as the life of a Hoi Toider revolves around boats, fishing, and marine weather.

“Mommucked” means to be extremely frustrated. A porch is a “pizer.” “Whopperjawed” means something is out of true. A “dingbatter” is a mainlander. And lest you think that all of these terms are straight out of Shakespearean English, that one comes from the early 1970s. Television first came to Ocracoke in 1972, when the show All in the Family was a huge hit. Archie Bunker used to call his wife, Edith, a dingbat, and the term ended up in wide use on Ocracoke to refer to the many tourists who didn’t know their port from their starboard.

These are all white accents, and North Carolina is, of course, not all white. The state is about 23 percent black and 15 percent Latinx, and has the sixth largest Native American population of any state in the country.

The idea that there are regional African-American dialects is actually sort of new to linguistics, likely due to the fact that the field has long been dominated by white, and often Northern, men. Hell, it’s really only in the past couple of decades that linguists have studied African-American English as a dialect, rather than as an incorrect or broken form of “standard,” white American English. There was, and often still is, an assumption among linguists that there is a homogeneous African-American English. Really though, there are simply some core African-American language features that span the country, and regional variations on those.

In any case, African-American North Carolinians seem to have a geographic division of dialects and accents, too. This video shows a substantial difference in vowel sounds between Appalachian and coastal speech, with coastal speech having some, but not all, of the Hoi Toider accent. Wolfram conducted experiments that found that listeners usually could not distinguish between old North Carolinians, regardless of race. Those same listeners, though, easily distinguished younger white from younger black North Carolinians, which is generally the case nationally as well. As with the other regional Southern accents, black North Carolinians are experiencing leveling. As white North Carolinians level to a way of speaking more like the rest of the white South, black North Carolinians are leveling to the black South.

A forthcoming book from Wolfram and Mary Kohn looks at regionality in African-American English, often using North Carolina as a base, and finds empirical differences by region. But there are so many other variables in African-American English: geographic region, urban versus rural, the stigmatization of black speech by whites, class differences, demographics—all kinds of stuff. It’s very complicated, and linguists are only now starting to try to unpack it.

The Latinx population in North Carolina is a more recent arrival, and faster-growing than any other non-white population in the state. The English spoken by native English speakers of Latin American descent in North Carolina is newish, but has the potential to become, or might already be, a distinct dialect. That long “i” sound in “spied” seems to be somewhere in between the sound in a Spanish word like “hay” and the flattened, monophthong “ah” of a white North Carolinian. There’s also a substantial overlap in language between Latinx and African-American populations in North Carolina, so Latinx speakers sometimes use what’s called the “habitual be,” as in “I be speaking.” It’s a form that indicates an ongoing action, and it’s heavily associated with African-American English. Latinx populations adopting African-American English features isn’t new, of course. It’s been well-documented in, just for example, the Puerto Rican population in New York City.

The Lumbee Indians make up the largest tribe east of the Mississippi, and mostly live in the eastern part of North Carolina. Wolfram has also studied Lumbee English, which sometimes has the Hoi Toider vowel change, but also comes with a series of vocabulary and grammatical distinctions. “Ellick” is a sweetened coffee, “juvember” is a slingshot, that kind of thing. What’s especially fascinating about the Lumbee population is that it’s so concentrated, which is extremely unusual for Native Americans in the Eastern United States. The small city of Pembroke is a whopping 90 percent Lumbee. That concentration functions as an isolating factor, and isolation is key for maintaining regional accents and dialects.

Basically, the Lumbee have sustained their regional accent in a much stronger enduring way than other populations. Ocracoke has a regional accent because it’s literally an island; Pembroke has one because it’s figuratively an island.

So North Carolina has a startling variety of American English dialects, including a couple found nowhere else. Yet, if you travel to North Carolina, there’s an extremely high chance that you won’t hear any of them.

NORTH CAROLINA HAS THE LINGUISTIC advantage of varied geography and a central location within the Southeast. But over the past 75 years or so, accents and dialects have been fading incredibly rapidly. Urbanization, an influx of new residents from other American regions and abroad, increased communication and national media, and improved infrastructure have all contributed to leveling throughout the South.

Today, the vast majority of the South sounds, largely, the same. The biggest split left is urban versus rural. Someone from rural Georgia sounds, for the most part, like someone from rural Texas, rural Tennessee, or rural Virginia. The cities sound like each other, too, and thanks to a greater flow of people, but then again Southern accents in cities have always been far weaker than those in the country. North Carolina is not exempt from any of this.

“The Southern-sounding accents have become more like each other, and in the cities they’re more like national norms,” says Thomas. The number of people speaking a Hoi Toider dialect on Ocracoke is down in the low hundreds. Good luck finding someone with a Tidewater accent who’s under 90 years old.

But a combination of geography, weather, and infrastructure have slowed dialect leveling in North Carolina a bit. “Before the 1920s, North Carolina had absolutely awful roads,” says Thomas. In the springtime, rains would turn the meager dirt roads into impassable mud pits. The Outer Banks relied on water transportation, isolating it from the mainland. Ocracoke still has no bridge. North Carolina’s Appalachian region is rugged and extreme, as distant from a major city as Appalachian West Virginia or Kentucky. That isolation has kept the local Appalachian English around, though it, too, is fading.

There are efforts to save endangered languages around the world, but dialects are generally left to mutate, merge, or disappear as part of the natural order of things. They are harder to get a hold of than distinct languages. Not all features are used by all speakers, the borders are fuzzy, the changes frequent.

“I’m one of the few people who says there’s no reason to exclude dialects from the endangerment canon, and there’s every reason to include them. They don’t much listen to me,” laughs Wolfram, who is trying his best to save or preserve the Pamlico Sound dialect. He has spent his spring break every year for the past 27 years teaching a class on it, on the island itself. “They’re interested,” he says, “but they’re not really saying they want to keep the dialect alive.”

Leveling has swept into the South like a tide. North Carolina has pockets that are hard for the water to reach, tidepools resistant to waves. But a roising toid is probably going to reach them, too.

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Today’s post looks at ways of talking about the speed at which people, vehicles, or other things move. Many of the items in this post can also be used figuratively, for instance to describe the speed of change or progress.

We often use the word pace to talk about how fast people or things are moving. Typical collocations for describing slow movements are sedate, steady, leisurely, and unhurried:

The motorcade drove at a sedate pace towards the palace.

They continued their shopping at an unhurried pace.

Sluggish is slightly more negative and implies reluctance or a lack of energy. Something moving at a snail’s pace is going very slowly and glacial describes an even more extreme slowness. We might also say that something extremely slow is agonizingly or painfully slow:

He played the sonata at a rather sluggish pace.

These ships travel at a snail’s pace compared to modern vessels.

We were frustrated by the glacial speed of the legal process.

The pace of change has been agonizingly slow.

At the other end of the scale, something or someone moving at a blistering pace (or in UK English at a cracking pace) is going very quickly:

He started the race at a blistering pace.

A simple way of saying that something, especially a vehicle, is moving fast is that it is moving at speed. If it is going as fast as possible, it is at full speed or – more informally – going flat out. Other emphatic phrases include lightning speed and breakneck speed, which often implies recklessness, while a person going as fast as their legs will carry them is running as fast as they can:

The vehicle came towards us at speed.

We won’t get there in under three hours, even if we go flat out.

She came down the stairs at breakneck speed.

They ran off as fast as their legs would carry them.

Single-word alternatives to ‘fast’ include rapid or the slightly more formal swift:

Responses to cold water include rapid breathing.

Swift action was needed to stop the spread of the disease.

In contrast, something moving very slowly – especially a vehicle – might be said to be inching along or crawling along:

Trains in the area have to crawl along because of the ancient tracks.

If you found this post useful, you could also take a look at Kate Woodford’s post about walking and running, which covers some more vocabulary related to this topic.

Today’s post looks at ways of talking about the speed at which people, vehicles, or other things move. Many of the items in this post can also be used figuratively, for instance to describe the speed of change or progress.

We often use the word pace to talk about how fast people or things are moving. Typical collocations for describing slow movements are sedate, steady, leisurely, and unhurried:

The motorcade drove at a sedate pace towards the palace.

They continued their shopping at an unhurried pace.

Sluggish is slightly more negative and implies reluctance or a lack of energy. Something moving at a snail’s pace is going very slowly and glacial describes an even more extreme slowness. We might also say that something extremely slow is agonizingly or painfully slow:

He played the sonata at a rather sluggish pace.

These ships travel at a snail’s pace compared to modern vessels.

We were frustrated by the glacial speed of the legal process.

The pace of change has been agonizingly slow.

At the other end of the scale, something or someone moving at a blistering pace (or in UK English at a cracking pace) is going very quickly:

He started the race at a blistering pace.

A simple way of saying that something, especially a vehicle, is moving fast is that it is moving at speed. If it is going as fast as possible, it is at full speed or – more informally – going flat out. Other emphatic phrases include lightning speed and breakneck speed, which often implies recklessness, while a person going as fast as their legs will carry them is running as fast as they can:

The vehicle came towards us at speed.

We won’t get there in under three hours, even if we go flat out.

She came down the stairs at breakneck speed.

They ran off as fast as their legs would carry them.

Single-word alternatives to ‘fast’ include rapid or the slightly more formal swift:

Responses to cold water include rapid breathing.

Swift action was needed to stop the spread of the disease.

In contrast, something moving very slowly – especially a vehicle – might be said to be inching along or crawling along:

Trains in the area have to crawl along because of the ancient tracks.

If you found this post useful, you could also take a look at Kate Woodford’s post about walking and running, which covers some more vocabulary related to this topic.