While the construct of heritage language continues to receive accelerated attention, the notion of heritage dialects is generally dismissed as insignificant or irrelevant in the heritage language canon. This presentation disputes this dismissal by focusing on a couple of language situations in North Carolina that warrant detailed investigation as “heritage dialects”—the case of Outer Banks English, which has existed for nearly three centuries and is now an endangered dialect, and the case of Lumbee English, a unique dialect spoken by the Lumbee Indians in southeast North Carolina. The Lumbee are now far removed from their ancestral indigenous language, but have maintained an iconic English dialect that distinguishes them from both white and black speakers in the tri-ethnic context of Robeson County. We use these sociolinguistic situations to argue for the validity of the construct of heritage dialects as spoken by some of the youth, citing linguistic details and social circumstances that support this claim. The evidence is based on a couple of decades of sociolinguistic research and community collaboration with these diverse communities.