A shibboleth is a marker, originally and still often linguistic in nature, used by members of one group as an identity badge.
The term is actually a loan word from the Hebrew, where it names the grain-bearing part of cereal plants, and it entered the English language by way of an incident in the Book of Judges in the Bible.
An Israelite civil war broke out between the tribe of Ephraim, which had settled in what is now called the West Bank, and the men of Gilead, who lived across the river in what is now Jordan. During the conflict, the warriors of Gilead seized control of the only fords across the Jordan River, and they stopped anyone attempting to cross. The Gileadites would then make the traveler (who was under suspicion of being an enemy fighter) try to pronounce the word "shibboleth." If he said the word correctly, the traveler was allowed to pass; but if he said "sibboleth" instead, the Gileadites knew he was an Ephraimite trying to sneak across, so they killed him on the spot.
Fortunately, today's shibboleths aren't so uniformly fatal, although they can still be socially debilitating. Or, at the very least, they will tell your listeners loud and clear that "You aren't from around here." We have a number of such words in this part of North Carolina. Take pecan, for instance. Is it pronounced "pea-CAN," "pick-CONN," or"PEA-conn?" (I say it the last way, but that may be because I had a grandmother who was originally from rural Union County, N.C., near Charlotte, on the S.C. state line.)
Other local shibboleths are geographical in origin. What do you do with the "o" in "Reynolda" and "Colfax?" Traditional local practice has tended to favor "Rinn-OLD-uh" for the first, and to pronounce the first syllable of "Colfax" with the same vowel as at the start of "collar" or "collard greens" - ad campaigns by certain local furniture companies notwithstanding.
So, if you find yourself reversing those two vowel sounds, don't be surprised if someone asks, "You're not from around here, are you?"
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