Boomer, sigogglin’ and y’all are just a few of the many words that scream that the speaker is from North Caro lina.

Walt Wolfram, a professor of linguistics, has the abil ity to pinpoint where most North Carolinians were born and raised simply by how they utter a few words or phrases. It’s all thanks to his several decades-worth of work study ing different dialects found in North Carolina.

“When I started out I want ed to be a missionary and do good for the world,” Wolfram said. “I had an aptitude for languages and was interest ed and loved doing academic study. I didn’t want to make academic study a sort of end in its own right. There’s so much misunderstanding of language differences — what they mean, and so that’s been sort of a passion of mine.”

Wolfram said that his start with linguistics was a mod est one.

“I just got a videographer and started doing documen taries,” Wolfram said. “I was always doing documenta ries.”

The first of Wolfram’s three current film projects is called “Core.Sounders” and centers on the dying North Carolin ian fishing industry and the languages that accompany it. It premiered March 14 at the North Carolina Museum of History.

Wolfram is also working on a project documenting the re vitalization of the Cherokee language. It is slated to be fin ished by the end of the year.

“It’s really cool because people are excited about American Indian languages that are dying and what we can do to save them,” Wol fram said.

The newest film project Wolfram is working on is tit led “Talking Black in America” and is funded by a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

“We’ll be spending three years going to Africa and the Middle Passage in the Caribbean’s,” Wolfram said. “We’ll be traveling all around the country to document Af ricaMerica speech in urban areas ranging from, sort of, the President to most modest laborer.”

On top of the various film projects Wolfram is working on, he also has a book in the works that will be available next spring. Titled Talk ing Tar Heel: Voice of North Carolina, the interactive E-version of the publication will include quick response codes that allow the reader to view videos and listen to the audio of 125 different interactive media pieces.

“What’s exciting about that is language is kind of meant to be heard and seen,” Wol fram said. “It’s hard to talk about how people say things but this way they’ll have im mediate access to it, which for us is really cool.”

Wolfram recently put his work into action at the North Carolina State Fair. Wolfram, with 40 graduate students from his class manning the booth, ran the North Carolina Life and Language Project as way to showcase the many unique dialects found across North Carolina.

“There’s interactive stuff,” Wolfram said. “There’s a touch screen monitor, and we have a sort of looped video of different scenes from dif ferent places in North Carolina. We give out pins, we sell t-shirts, we have DVDs, and we have banners celebrating different varieties. The ban ners celebrate the Lumbee language, AfricaMerica, Outer Banks English, languages of the cities with the dialect of Charlotte and Raleigh and so forth.”

According to Wolfram, there’s a science to figuring out where someone might be from with his or her dialect.

“We can’t tell exact ly [where you’re from] so we use examples,” Wolfram said. “We can use pronunciation of a certain word. So, for exam ple, everyone in North Caro lina would say time drawing out the letter ‘I’. Only people in the Coastal plains and in the mountains would say white rice adding an ‘A’ sound between the ‘W’ and the ‘H’ and then again between the ‘R’ and the ‘I’. There are pro nunciation things and then there are also vocabulary items that are regional in nature.”

Wolfram explained that while a few various things might cause a change in dia lect, such as gender, there’s always one question that clearly displays where some one comes from.

“There is one question, though, that we can always use to figure out where you’re from,” Wolfram said. “Pronounce the name of where you’re from. It’s a joke, but lots of locals have some weird ways of pronouncing places.”

Wolfram said that there’s one main mission of the project: Turning away from the negative stereotypes tacked onto Southern speech and embracing the dialects as cultural heritage.

“We want people in North Carolina who love their state and love their heritage and love things North Carolinian, we want them to include the language diversity and the language landscape of North Carolina,” Wolfram said. “People are growing up ashamed because they’ve been sold on the socialization. They’ve been indoctrinated into the idea that Southern speech is bad speech. We want them to see that’s it a part of their heritage and embrace it.”