6 North Carolina Words and Phrases Linguists Have Tracked From the Mountains to the Coast

Order a drink or ask for directions in a different part of North Carolina, and you may notice the language sounds a little different.

Some of these words may sound like home to you.

Others may stump even lifelong North Carolinians.

Here are the words and phrases linguists have followed across the state.

1. Right Smart

The phrase “right smart” turns up in 1939 recordings of Smoky Mountain speech, including one Joseph Hall made in Waynesville, North Carolina.

Hall, then studying linguistics at Columbia University, recorded speakers in and around the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee.

In Waynesville, one speaker used the phrase for a man well along in years.

Another, in Cades Cove, Tennessee, used it for how far a man’s father lived from Bryson City.

Years and miles both fit.

Right smart means many, much, or a good deal of something, according to the University of South Carolina’s Appalachian English website, which also hosts Hall’s recordings.

If a neighbor tells you the trailhead is a right smart piece up the road, you’ve got a distance without a number.

The Dictionary of American Regional English labels this usage “South, South Midland,” so the phrase reaches beyond the mountains.

2. Break Daylight

“Break daylight” is a Smoky Mountain phrase for dawn.

Hall collected three examples of it, one from Smokemont in 1937 and two from Proctor and Indian Creek in 1939.

All three are North Carolina examples in the university’s Southern Appalachian English dictionary.

In the Indian Creek example, a woman waits until it’s light enough to see to walk, then heads home with her two young children.

You stress both “day” and “light” when you say it.

It’s plain, and it works.

3. Boot

Would you know what to do if a host in the Coastal Plain asked you to put your luggage in the “boot”?

You’d open the trunk.

Wolfram gives boot a section in the same 2018 guest post.

He opens that post with the project’s tally: More than 3,500 interviews over a quarter century.

Older residents in rural counties such as Bertie in the north and New Hanover in the south may use the word for a trunk, Wolfram says.

Those residents didn’t travel to England to pick up the word.

Boot is an older English term for the luggage compartment that often sat under the driver’s seat in horse-and-buggy days.

4. On the Swamp

In the Lumbee English of Robeson County, the phrase “on the swamp” means the neighborhood, according to a 2000 news release from North Carolina State University.

The Lumbee population there, and in the rest of southeastern North Carolina, was 47,000.

That’s a lot of neighbors.

So if you hear a friend say they live on the swamp, you’ve just been given an address.

Linguist Walt Wolfram studied Lumbee speech for six years before producing a half-hour documentary, Indian By Birth: The Lumbee Dialect.

His analysis rests on interviews with more than 150 Lumbee people and 50 other residents.

Wolfram gives the same definition for the phrase on PBS’s page on Lumbee English.

Historical evidence shows the Lumbee people have spoken English for more than two centuries.

5. Up the Beach

On Ocracoke, one of the Outer Banks islands, the phrase “up the beach” means leaving the island to shop.

Low on groceries?

Then you’re going up the beach.

Sociolinguist Walt Wolfram began studying the island’s brogue in the 1990s.

In a 2018 article in Coastwatch, North Carolina Sea Grant’s magazine, he names going up the beach among the island’s sayings.

He pairs it with “meehonkey,” a game of hide and seek that islanders play at night.

Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes wrote a book on the island’s speech, Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue.

6. North Cackalacky

Linguist Walt Wolfram calls “North Cackalacky” one of the state’s most revealing nicknames.

In his 2018 guest post, he says servicemen assigned to rural bases in the 1940s used Cackalacky to deride the rural ways of people born in the state.

Locals took it back.

The name is now an affectionate reference to state identity.

As for where it came from, the most probable origin is a sound-play utterance that parodied the rural ways of people from Carolina.

Other proposals include the Cherokee word tsalaki, the German word for cockroach, kakerlake, and the Scottish soup cocklakeelie.

So when you say North Cackalacky today, you’re using a nickname that began as a jab.

Sayings Without One Region

Some words and phrases turn up in more than one region of the state.

If you pronounce right as rain as “raht as rain,” Our State reports, linguist Walt Wolfram can tell you’re from either Appalachia or the Coastal Plain.

Appalachia and the Coastal Plain sit at opposite ends of the state.

Speakers in both say it.

Wolfram’s 2018 guest post also covers weren’t, as in “I weren’t there.”

He finds it on islands such as Ocracoke and Harkers Island, and among the Lumbee in mainland Robeson County.

Where the Recordings Come From

Joseph Hall’s Smoky Mountain recordings began in June 1939 and ran seven months.

The National Park Service and the Civilian Conservation Corps furnished his recording equipment, transportation, and an assistant.

His first summer in the mountains, in 1937, produced notebooks of notes and transcriptions, not recordings.

Notes came first.

Wolfram’s project has also run a booth at the North Carolina State Fair.

North Carolina State University said in a 2013 preview that about 40 of his students would work four-hour shifts at the booth during the fair’s 11 days.

If you’d joined the display that year, you’d have left with an “I Speak N.C.” button or T-shirt.

Dialect Change

North Carolina State University linguists Walt Wolfram and Brody McCurdy wrote a 2022 quiz on how the state’s dialects have changed.

In it, they say in-migration, tourism, and other demographic shifts have accelerated change in some regions.

More remote, independent rural areas have been changing at a much slower pace.

Ocracoke is one example.