Subject-Verb Concord in a Postinsular Dialect

Abstract

Most natives of Ocracoke, North Carolina, will attribute their roots to the Eng lish who began coming to the island at the start of the eighteenth century. Some Ocracokers will also admit to Scots or Scots-Irish ancestry, and some, especially those bearing Scottish names, are quite proud of it. Almost 300 years removed from the time of the first Anglo-American settlement on Ocracoke, the distinctions between English and Scots origins would seemingly be erased in all but name. To a great extent this is true, but the island of Ocracoke has only been in a postinsular stage of development for 40 years, previously cut off from the mainland except by small boat (Wolfram, Hazen, and Schilling-Estes 1999). This isolation has allowed one aspect of their grammatical system, their subject-verb concord system, to maintain almost the same patterns that existed in Scots English more than 600 years ago. In this quantitative study of the Ocracoke English subject-verb concord system, I present data and statistics from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with ancestral islanders to support the hypothesis that the subject-verb concord pattern of Scots English, although not the predominant pattern, has structurally persisted with only minor adjustments for more than 600 years. The subject-verb concord pattern was transferred from Scotland to Ulster, Ireland, and remained there for more than a century before it was transferred to the United States. The Scots-Irish who came to the United States carried with them the same pattern as their Scots ancestors but at reduced rates (Montgomery and Robinson 1996). The rates of the Ocracoke pattern are lower, but the pattern persists. I also hypothesize that the Ocracoke subject-verb concord system is the result of dialect mixing. The two contributing dialects are the eighteenth-century British system (the superstrate) and the eighteenth-century Scots-Irish system (the sub AUTHOR’S NOTE:I would like to thank Walt Wolfram for his patience with this article and the formative criticism he gave through his many readings. The research for this article was supported by an NSF grant (SBR-93-19577) directed by Walt Wolfram. I would also like to thank Michael Montgomery and the two JEngL reviewers for a number of insightful comments and criticisms on the current version of this article.