to merge with the sound of far, as well as tire with tar. The diphthong ends with a more fronted quality, commonly realized as a shorter off-glide with little or no rounding . The sound has also been described as , with a very raised beginning (or on-glide) to the diphthong; for example, making town sound like teh-een. Front vowel raising in certain environments, though most noticeably before and : Merger of and , as in the characteristic pronunciation of fish as feesh or kitchen as keetchen . This may be represented as or . Raising of in this environment, causing mesh to sound almost like maysh. The r-colored vowel may have an opener vowel sound: , making the sound of fair almost merge with fire and far. There is no cot–caught merger. The vowel is largely fronted, as in much of the rest of the modern-day South: . Unstressed, word-final may be pronounced , causing yellow to sound like yeller, fellow like feller, potato like (po)tater, and mosquito like (mo)skeeter. Elision of some medial or final stops, as in cape sounding more like cay. Strong, bunched-tongue rhoticity, similar to West Country English, Scottish English, and Irish English, Pin–pen merger. Lexical features The island dialect has also retained archaic vocabulary in regular usage. Some examples include mommuck, meaning "to frustrate" or "bother", yethy, describing stale or unpleasant odor, and nicket, meaning a pinch of something used as in cooking. The islanders have also developed unique local words used in regular conversation, including dingbatter to refer to a visitor or recent arrival to the island, and dit-dot, a term developed from a joke about Morse code, and used to describe any visitor to the island who has difficulty understanding the local dialect. In popular culture In the 1991 Paramount film The Butcher's Wife, the main character Marina is from Ocracoke, North Carolina, and exhibits features of Hoi Toider dialect. Notes References Bibliography North Carolina culture Virginia culture Dialects of English Carteret County, North Carolina English-American culture in North Carolina