High Tider

High Tider, Hoi Toider, or Hoi Toide English is a family or continuum of American English dialects spoken in very limited communities of the South Atlantic United States, particularly several small islands and coastal townships. The exact areas include the rural "Down East" region of North Carolina, which encompasses the Outer Banks and Pamlico Sound—specifically Ocracoke, Atlantic, Davis, Sea Level, and Harkers Island in eastern Carteret County, and the village of Wanchese—plus the Chesapeake Bay, such as Smith Island in Maryland, as well as Guinea Neck and Tangier Island in Virginia. The High Tider sound has been observed as far west as Bertie County, North Carolina; the term is also a local nickname for any native-speaking resident of the relevant North Carolina region.

These dialects do not have a name that is uniformly used in the academic literature, with "Hoi Toider" used for the Outer Banks and mainly Ocracoke; rather, a variety of names exist based on location, such as Down East, Outer Banks, or Chesapeake Bay English, dialect, brogue, or accent. Most speakers in the Outer Banks themselves refer to their dialect as "the brogue". Ocracoke English and Smith Island English are the two best-studied varieties, with the linguists Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling researching them in detail since the 1990s onwards.

The 2006 Atlas of North American English does not consider these dialects to fall under the Southern U.S. regional dialect since they do not participate in the first stage of the Southern Vowel Shift, but they share commonalities as full members of the larger Southeastern regional super-dialect in fronting the and vowels, exhibiting the pin–pen merger, resisting the cot–caught merger, and being strongly rhotic with a retroflex .

History

The term "hoi toide" appears in a local colloquial rhyme, "It's high tide on the sound side", often phonetically spelled "hoi toide on the saind soide" [hɒɪ ˈtɒɪd ɑn ðə ˈsaɪnd sɒɪd], as a marker of pronunciation to sharply differentiate speakers of the Outer Banks brogue from speakers of the mainland Southern dialects. The phrase was first recorded as a significant identifier of the dialect in 1993, and has since been used frequently for "performative" purposes by native speakers to demonstrate the dialect to outsiders.

With a long history of geographical and economic isolation from mainland North Carolina, Outer Banks areas such as Ocracoke Island, Harkers Island, and Atlantic developed a distinct dialect of English.