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Talk Like a Tar Heel: North Carolina Place Names

Listen to North Carolina place names pronounced by local authors, Bland Simpson and Michael McFee by clicking on the county name on the state map or in the list below. (It is recognized that there are local variations that differ from those shown here--some Iredell County residents call their home "ARE-dell," for example--but no attempt has been made to list them here.)

Read the "Guide to Pronouncing County Names" by John L. Sanders, former director of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Contact the North Carolina Collection with your questions, comments, and suggestions of other North Carolina names that you would like to hear pronounced: [email protected]

North Carolina Cities, Counties, Towns, Mountains, and More: Pronunciations
Read by Bland Simpson and Michael McFee

About Bland Simpson

Bland Simpson directs the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Creative Writing Program, and he is a longtime member of the Tony Award-winning Red Clay Ramblers. His latest book is Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals, The Mystery of the Carroll A. Deering (2002), and his earlier books include Heart of the Country (1983), The Great Dismal (1990), The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey (1993), and Into the Sound Country: A Carolinian's Coastal Plain (1997), with photography by his wife, Ann Cary Simpson. He has also collaborated on such musicals as King Mackerel & the Blues are Running, Kudzu, Diamond Studs, and the three-time Broadway and international hit Fool Moon. Simpson, who grew up in both Elizabeth City (Pasquotank County) and Chapel Hill (Orange County), has won the Governor's Award "Conservation Communicator of the Year" (1998) and the Brown-Hudson Award from the NC Folklore Society (1999); he was 2002 Chair of the North Carolina Writers Conference.

About Michael McFee

Michael McFee was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1954, and grew up in the small town of Arden in the Blue Ridge Mountains. He received his B.A. (1976) and M.A. (1978) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has been poet-in-residence at Cornell and Lawrence Universities, and is now a Professor of English at his alma mater, where he teaches poetry writing and contemporary North Carolina literature.

Among his collections of poetry are Earthly (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001), Colander (Carnegie Mellon, 1996), To See (a collaboration with photographer Elizabeth Matheson: North Carolina Wesleyan College Press, 1991), Sad Girl Sitting on a Running Board (Gnomon Press, 1991), and Vanishing Acts (Gnomon, 1989). He has also edited two anthologies of North Carolina literature: This Is Where We Live: Short Stories by 25 Contemporary North Carolina Writers (University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and The Language They Speak Is Things to Eat: Poems by Fifteen Contemporary North Carolina Poets (UNC Press, 1994).

Technical Note:

The recordings of North Carolina County names are saved as MP3 files. Most current audio players, including RealPlayer, Windows Media Player, and QuickTime for Macintosh, can play MP3s. Visit mpeg.org for more information about playing MP3s (http://www.mpeg.org/MPEG/MPEG-audio-player.html).

The recordings of Bland Simpson and Michael McFee were made by recording engineer John Loy in the Manuscripts Department's John M. Rivers Audio Preservation Studio.