High Tider, Hoi Toider, or High Tide English is a dialect of American English spoken in very limited communities of the South Atlantic United States, particularly several small island and coastal townships in the rural "Down East" region of North Carolina, which encompasses the Outer Banks and Pamlico Sound (specifically including Atlantic, Sea Level, and Harkers Island in eastern Carteret County, the village of Wanchese, and also Ocracoke) as well as in the Chesapeake Bay (such as Guinea Neck in Gloucester County and Tangier Island in Virginia and Smith Island in Maryland). High Tider dialect has been observed as far west as Bertie County, North Carolina. The term is also a local nickname for any native resident of these regions. The dialect does not have a name that is uniformly used in the academic literature, but it is referenced by a variety of names, including Hoi Toider (or, more restrictively based on region, Down East, Chesapeake Bay, or Outer Banks) English, dialect, brogue, or accent. The Atlas of North American English does not consider Hoi Toider dialect to be a subset of Southern U.S. dialect since it does not participate in the first stage of the Southern Vowel Shift, but it shares commonalities as a full member of the larger Southeastern super-dialect region (in fronting the and vowels, exhibiting the pin–pen merger, resisting the cot–caught merger, and being strongly rhotic), similar to West Country English, Scottish English, and Irish English. Wolfram & Schilling-Estes (1997) provides the most detailed study of this variety in North Carolina. History The term "hoi toid" appears in a local colloquial rhyme, "It's high tide on the sound side," phonetically spelled "hoi toide on the saind soide" , as a marker of pronunciation (or shibboleth) to sharply differentiate speakers of this dialect from speakers of the mainland Southern dialects. The phrase was first recorded as a significant identifier of the dialect in 1993, and has since been used frequently for "performative" purposes by native speakers to demonstrate the dialect to outsiders. Most native speakers of the dialect refer to it as a brogue. With a long history of geographical and economic isolation from mainland North Carolina, residents of Harkers Island and other Outer Banks areas such as Ocracoke Island and Atlantic developed a distinct dialect of English. Linguists who have studied this dialect note that it has "roots... in a number of Early Modern English dialects",