SALISBURY – Anyone who’s ever been on the “wooder” off Deal Island in choppy seas knows it can get rough enough to “roll the yeast out of a biscuit.”
And while a person might be out of luck if he’s looking for a local fire hall that hosts a bingo night, he’ll probably have no problem finding a “far hall.”
The U.S. Census Bureau places Maryland in the American South, and the Delmarva accent does bear several similarities to speech heard elsewhere in that region. But in the talk of Eastern Shore residents – at least the ones who have grown up here – there are also hints of Baltimore, Philadelphia and other coastal cities, as well as several features unique to this area.
Arby Holland, 54, has operated Arby’s General Store on Deal Island Road for about 20 years and is a native of Wenona at the southern end of the island.
“Wenona is the capital of Deal Island, I tell everybody,” said Holland, whose store sells supplies for watermen.
Like many natives of the area who hear the local patterns of speech every day, Holland at first seemed hard-pressed to describe the area’s accent. But then he hit on the local pronunciation of one of the marine animals that watermen make a living from.
“Instead of oyster, you hear arsters,” Holland said.
Another feature of the language of the area, according to Holland, is the slang for potatoes and tomatoes. For some on the Lower Shore, these become “taters” and “maters.”
But while some features of the area’s accent are common throughout the Shore, there are wide variations. Perhaps the most unique speech is found on the Chesapeake Bay enclaves of Smith Island and Tangier Island.
Natalie Schilling-Estes, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and a native of the Lower Shore, has studied the Smith Island dialect. She said Smith Islanders have a set of pronunciations that aren’t found in other parts of Delmarva.
For one thing, the island’s residents use an “oy” sound in some words in place of an “eye” sound, so “nice” comes out more like “noyce,” Schilling-Estes said. She said another unique pronunciation changes the “ow” sound found in words like “loud” to the “ai” in “gain.”
"A word like ‘down’ sounds almost like ‘dane,’ " she said. “That’s kind of really unusual for American English dialects.”
Schilling-Estes said Smith Island shares a peculiar word with Tangier Island, a little further south in Virginia – “yarney.”
“This is actually what Smith Islanders call people from Tangier Island, but also what Tangier Islanders call people from Smith Island,” she said.
Other words found on Smith Island that might seem like a foreign language to outsiders are the vocabulary of watermen and are used on the mainland Eastern Shore as well. Many residents of the Lower Shore will recognize “jimmy crab” as a male crab and “buster” as a crab shedding its shell.
Walter Holland Jr., Arby Holland’s 29-year-old son, pointed out that some pronunciations used in this area seem to come from the colonial past. For instance, he said some older local residents will address someone as “ye” instead of “you.”
“They say that our slang is the closest to the old English,” Walter Holland said.
And the Eastern Shore shares common linguistic traits with other nearby areas as well. Visitors from the western shore metropolis of “Ballmer” are likely to hear the familiar pronunciation of their city here, instead of the three-syllable “Baltimore.”
Still other features of the local accent sound like speech heard in Philadelphia. For one thing, Schilling-Estes said Delmarva residents often use a pronunciation linguists refer to as “fronting the ‘o’ sound” in words like “go” or “phone.” The “o” in these words becomes something closer to an “aow” sound.
