Subject-Verb Concord in a Postinsular Dialect: The Gradual Persistence of Dialect Patterning
Kirk Hazen · Journal of English Linguistics · 2000
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 be-tween 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 ances-tral islanders to support the hypothesis that the subject-verb concord pattern of Scots English, although not the predominant pattern, has structurally persisted with