Island Brogue

“Hoi Toider,” as the Ocracoke Brogue is also known, is a dialect of American English spoken only on remote islands in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. The unique accent and vocabulary, derived from Irish and Scottish colonists, evolved into its own dialect over the centuries as a result of the area’s extreme isolation. Visitors often mistake the accent as British or Australian, but with origins dating back to the 1600s, Ocracoke Brogue is about as American as it gets.

A small number of Ocracoke Island residents still speak in the brogue. However, as they’ve married mainlanders (known in the brogue as “dingbatters”), and their children have not been raised speaking the brogue, this is a dialect facing demise. Walt Wolfram, a distinguished linguistics professor at N.C. State University who has studied the Ocracoke Brogue for decades estimates that this unique dialect will disappear completely within the next 50 years.