Word-gathering earns award for linguist

Walt Wolfram is a nomad of the word. The 67-year-old scholar has spent his life crisscrossing America -- from the Ozark Mountains to the streets of Detroit, from the New Mexico desert to the shores of the Outer Banks -- listening to people speak, collecting their words.

He's enjoyed ellick (coffee with sugar) with Lumbee Indians and downed dopes (soda pop) with old-timers in the North Carolina mountains. He has never played meehonkey (hide and seek) with Ocracoke Islanders, but he has made one of their phrases his own: "Don't mommuck [hassle] me, man."

A professor of English linguistics at N.C. State University, Wolfram has shared his love of language through groundbreaking books such as "A Sociolinguistic Description of Detroit Negro Speech" (1969) and "Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks" (1997). He has made documentaries about North Carolina dialects with Neal Hutcheson, including "Indian by Birth: The Lumbee Dialect" (2001) and "This Side of the River: Self Determination and Survival in the Oldest Black Town in America" (2006).

"I love to wander and I love words," Wolfram explained, "whether it's traditional dialects that are fading away in Appalachia or new ones that are emerging through Vietnamese-, Hispanic- and African-Americans, our language is always growing and changing."

Wolfram will be honored for his work tonight with John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities, presented by the N.C. Council for the Humanities.

Inaugurated in 1990, the Caldwell salutes North Carolinians who have made a significant contribution to our "civic, personal, intellectual, and moral" life.

Wolfram will receive the award at a 7 p.m. ceremony in NCSU's Stewart Theater. Previous recipients include historian John Hope Franklin, broadcaster Charles Kuralt, educator William Friday and writers Doris Betts, Reynolds Price and Louis D. Rubin Jr.

Born in Philadelphia in 1941, Wolfram took an interest in language because of his German immigrant parents.

"They spoke with thick accents and if you remember your history, Germans weren't too popular back then," Wolfram said with a laugh. "I've always been interested in how language shapes who we are and how others see us."

Though his research has been wide-ranging, Wolfram's work has focused on North Carolina -- a place he has called "dialect heaven" -- since he moved here in 1992.

"We know that North Carolina has great writers and great storytellers," he said. "I want to tell people that we also have great language traditions. We should celebrate them and their cultures."