If you’ve lived in North Carolina for a while, you’ve probably seen “haw” pop-up on a map — Saxapahaw, Hawfields, Altamahaw, the Haw River.
For this edition of Carolina Curious, Listener Allan Buccola asked where the word comes from and why it appears in so many Piedmont community names.
“All of the names mentioned come from Cheraw language, which is a dead language now,” says Walt Wolfram, an NC State University linguistics professor who studies North Carolina dialects, including dead ones.
He says Cheraw was a Native American language once spoken by ancestors of the Catawba Nation. In it, “haw” describes terrain common in the Piedmont.
“It sort of refers to a hill, or steps,” Wolfram says.
The Haw River was likely named first, since it served as a major travel route for the area. He says the name was then adopted by the Europeans who settled in the region. Over time, Cheraw, like many other Indigenous languages in the state, faded.
“When you have a lot of diversity, different Indian groups can’t understand each other. Then they turn to learn English as a sort of lingua franca,” Wolfram says, meaning a common language used between different speakers.
Wolfram says those prior languages still left a significant legacy. More than twenty counties and hundreds of place names in North Carolina have Native roots.