THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603310055
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: NORTH CAROLINA
SOURCE: By MARTHA WAGGONER, ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HARKERS ISLAND, N.C. LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines
Hit hain't normal that he weren't a-feeshing at the saynd today.
That's how a native of this Carteret County island in southeastern North Carolina might say ``it isn't normal that he wasn't fishing at the sound today.''
Both are dialects, and both are perfectly legitimate, according to Walt Wolfram, a linguistic expert from North Carolina State University who is trying to dispel the notion that local dialects mark speakers as uneducated or dumb.
``The whole education system has taught students and instructors that dialects are simply unworthy appropriations of standard English, that the person who speaks a non-mainstream dialect does so because they fall short of the glory of mainstream English,'' Wolfram said. ``Nothing could be further from the truth.''
Everybody speaks in a dialect, he told students at Harkers Island Elementary School last week.
During the weeklong class, Wolfram and a graduate student taught eighth-graders how their dialects are structured, ``and why they're really neat.''
For example, the a-prefix on some verbs is a carry-over from English settlers. ``Because of isolation and so forth, it was simply retained here,'' Wolfram said.
The use of the plural ``weren't'' with a singular noun is called ``weren't regularization'' and is an effort to separate the positive from the negative, Wolfram said.
This is not the first such class taught by Wolfram, a nationally recognized dialect expert. In addition to Outer Banks dialects, he has studied Apppalachian English, black English and the dialect of the Lumbee Indians in Robeson County. He taught a class at Harkers Island last year, and has taught on Ocracoke Island for three years. He began teaching dialect classes in inner-city schools in Baltimore.
Wolfram began this class by playing a video featuring different speakers: Southerners, a woman from Brooklyn, black people and a woman with a Dutch accent.
The students were asked to pick the accents they liked best and least. The Dutch accent was a favorite.
Vick Horton said he didn't like ``the clown lady,'' referring to a Mississippi woman with a thick-as-molasses accent who wore bright blue eye shadow and big hair.
``She was stupid,'' he said.
``Is that stereotyping?'' Wolfram asked.
``Yeah, but she talked funny,'' Vick said.
``Is that stereotyping?'' Wolfram asked again.
Vick agreed he was stereotyping, but seemed to stick by the opinion he had formed.
Misty Baum said the tape showed that people think ``Northerners are rude, and Southerners speak too slowly.''
Many of these students are already aware their speech is different.
When Randa Willis, a native of Harkers Island, went to camp in Kinston, ``they made fun of the way I talk.'' The teasing didn't bother her, she said.
``I get made fun of at Beaufort,'' only a 30-minute ride away, said Chris Gillikin.
Gillikin said boys he knows in Beaufort kept asking him to say ``two,'' which he pronounces more forward in the mouth, almost with a long-e sound.
``They just mess with me,'' Chris said.
Randa said strangers sometimes think she speaks with a British accent, and Misty said she's been asked if she's from Australia.
The Outer Banks brogue is similar to the dialect of southwestern England, Wolfram said. A language expert from Great Britain once made tapes of Outer Banks natives speaking and played them for his class in England.
``Everyone identified the Outer Banks speakers as being from Eng-land,'' he said.
Wolfram has received grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities to help him spread the word that dialects should be a source of pride, not shame.
``Historically, the attitude is if you speak differently from other folks, you speak wrong,'' he said. ``In a sense, it's the same as saying if you don't look like other people, you don't look right, or if you don't dress like other people, you don't dress right.
``Our society tolerates considerably more discrimination and prejudice related to language differences than it does to other types of differences.
``If you tell someone you're the wrong sex or race to get a particular job, someone would end up in court in a minute. But people feel free to say if you don't talk right, you're not going to get the job.''
Wolfram is not opposed to students learning standard English ``as a social cosmetic that allows them to do what they want to do.'' But they shouldn't learn it under the illusion that their dialect is inferior, he said.
Debra Stinson, the language arts teacher whose class Wolfram visited, is not about to drop instruction in standard English.
``It is great they've come to tell us to take pride in the dialect,'' said Stinson, a native of Beaufort.
``But I would hate my students to go to East Carteret (the high school) and not know standard English and how to use it.'' by CNB