With the permission of the University of Tennessee Press, we are pleased to reproduce 28 entries (with updated bibliographies) from the volume’s section on Language. Published in 2006 after nearly a decade of work by a legion of writers and by a team of editors led by Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell, the Encyclopedia of Appalachia featured 1600 pages documenting a region more diverse than anyone had imagined before. You can order the volume at http://utpress.org/title/encyclopedia-of-appalachia/
You can explore the Encyclopedia’s Music section here: http://encyclopediaofappalachia.com/category.php?rec=53
Contents of the Language section:
Overview Essay, Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
African American Appalachian English: Kirk Hazen, West Virginia University
Appalachia (as a name): David S. Walls, Sonoma State University
Appalachian English and Ozark English: Michael Ellis, Missouri State University
Appalachian English in Literature: Michael Ellis, Missouri State University
Attitudes toward Appalachian English: Clare J. Dannenberg, University of Alaska, Anchorage
Cherokee: Bridget Anderson, Old Dominion University
Colonial Survivals in Appalachian Speech: Ted R. Ledford, Lees-McRae College
German: Silke Van Ness, State University of New York at Albany
Hall, Joseph Sargent (1906–1992) Scholar: Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Iroquoian Languages: Bruce L. Pearson, University of South Carolina
Kephart, Horace (1862–1931) Librarian, writer, and scholar: Karl Nicholas, Western Carolina University
Language and Gender: Anita Puckett, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Language Ideology: Anita Puckett, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Logging Terminology: Harold Farwell, Western Carolina University
Medical and Health Terminology: Anthony Cavender, East Tennessee State University
Melungeon: Anita Puckett, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Moonshining Terminology: Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Pennsylvania Speech: Michael Adams, Indiana University
Personal Names: Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Place Names: Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Shawnee: Bruce L. Pearson, University of South Carolina
Spanish: Ellen Johnson, Berry College
Specialized Language of Coal Mining: Stephen D. Mooney, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Speech Play: Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Upper Ohio Valley Speech: Beverly Olson Flanigan, Ohio University
Vulgarity and Obscenity: Loyal Jones, Berea, Kentucky
Williams, Cratis D.(1911–1985) Scholar and folklorist: Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Characterized by distinctive accents, syntax, and vocabulary, with the spicing of originality, Appalachian speech has long served as an emblem of the region’s natives, one that has inspired contradictory, at times fanciful and far-fetched notions about the region, its people, and their culture. The linguistic dexterity of Appalachian speakers, their story-telling skills, and their purportedly archaic vocabulary and phrasing have long fascinated outsiders. Appalachians have been romanticized as surviving speakers of “Elizabethan” English yet simultaneously scorned as backward users of substandard English that reflects the region’s isolation from the mainstream and whose very name bespeaks deeply entrenched socio-economic ills. Educator and social researcher John C. Campbell famously observed in 1921 that Appalachia was a land “about which, perhaps, more things are known that are not true than of any part of our country.” This statement pertains particularly well to the English spoken there. Whether fostering positive stereotypes or negative ones, how Appalachians speak has often marked them as different, generating many attempts to explain still another aspect of the region’s “otherness,” in the words of Henry Shapiro. One product of such perceptions is a belief that the region’s population and their culture are largely uniform, a misconception that persists to the present day. The heterogeneity of the region’s speech has increasingly led linguists to speak of “Appalachian Englishes.”
No one way–historical, geographical, or any other–perspective on the subject can adequately relate the complex roles that English has played in the life and history of Appalachia and its people. Though mountain speech is often believed to be the most distinctive regional variety in America, Appalachia is home to a spectrum of dialects. Research has shown that the ancestry of Appalachian speech is mixed and that in many ways it represents a microcosm of American English.
A multi-lingual background. Prior to English having its sway, Europeans were relative latecomers to Appalachia, first engaging speakers of indigenous languages around 1540, when the Spanish under Hernando de Soto encountered the Cherokee in the hill country and mountains of the present-day Carolinas and the Yuchi in northeastern Tennessee. Within a century French traders had made contact with the Cherokee’s Iroquoian-speaking cousins, including the Oneida and the Seneca, in the foothills of New York. Neither Spanish nor French took root as a community language, however, and it was not until the early eighteenth century, when Germans and English-speaking Scotch-Irish pressed westward into Pennsylvania and then southward into the Shenandoah Valley, that European languages were firmly planted in the region.
Dating from the late-seventeenth century, Scotch-Irish is the oldest name in the United States for emigrants from Ulster, the northernmost province of Ireland, and their descendants. Most of their earlier ancestors had come from Lowland Scotland, where for centuries people were known as Scotch (but now usually as Scots). This historical fact is preserved in Scotch-Irish, a name Americans have continued to employ. Also (but much less often) known as the Scots-Irish, most of the 150,000 or more Ulster emigrants who came in the American colonial period settled in the interior, where they and their culture and language became influential in much of Appalachia.
As previously mentioned, only English and German ever became community languages, with the latter declining precipitously in the nineteenth century), Appalachia has long been the destination of speakers of other European languages. In the nineteenth century, the region attracted small groups from Wales and France, as in the early-twentieth century it did Italians, Hungarians, Poles, among others to the coalfields of Central Appalachia. Among very recent arrivals are Mexicans, as in north Georgia. The image of Appalachia as being, or having ever been, monolingual does not match the patchwork of languages that could be heard.
The English heard in Appalachia has long attracted the interest of legions of journalists, travelers, and educators, and since the 1870s they have stressed one quality above all others—its conservatism. Being struck by usages reminding them of writers studied in literature classes, they have consistently labeled mountain speech as “Shakespearean,” “Chaucerian,” and the like. However respectable the roots suggested, such ideas have largely been discredited (see xx), though, and in recent decades Appalachian speech has had to compete with notions that it differs from “standard English” and is an inferior type of English and therefore an impediment to social mobility and educational progress. These conflicting views have simultaneously romanticized mountain speech (and by implication its users) as quaint while stigmatizing it as deviant. The public, scholars included, appears to have no difficulty maintaining widely conflicting, if not contradictory, ideas about the English language spoken in Appalachia.
Influenced by early backwoods humorists’ use in dialogue, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers such as humorist George Washington Harris and novelist Mary Noailles Murfree sought to enhance the exoticness of their fictional characters through their heavy use of often-exaggerated dialect, using contorted spellings to suggest the illiteracy or comedy of these characters (making them unreadable today). “Thar’s nun ove ’em fas’ enuf tu ketch me” is typical from one of Harris’s mountaineers. Many its and other forms later made their way into the Barney Google comic strip after Snuffy Smith was introduced to it in 1934. Reinforcing this stereotypical image since that time have been countless books, movies, television programs, and tourist-shop caricatures conveying the popular but unfounded notion that people from the hills use plumb ‘completely’ (“He fell plumb to the bottom”), right smart ‘a good deal (of)’ (“They lost a right smart in that trade”), among many others, are found only in the mountain and are used constantly. No matter how ludicrous, portrayals of mountain English in the media are often accepted as accurate outside Appalachia and consequently reinforce perceptions that mountain people are different and backward.
However, many commentators have also pointed out the expressiveness and adaptability of mountain speech and the resourcefulness of its speakers. These positive qualities are seen in fresh metaphors like kick ‘reject in courtship’ and can see to can’t see ‘dawn to dusk’; vivid similes (meaner than a striped snake; as thick as fiddlers in hell); abundant use of proverbs; descriptive place names such as Hell for Certain, Kentucky; novel conversions of one part of speech to another (the noun manpower as a verb meaning ‘move by brute effort,’ (“We’ll have to manpower that log up”); and in other ways.
Because the Appalachians cover a vast area from the Northeast to the Deep South, the region is too large to form a distinct or unified region in traditional culture or speech. Instead, linguists speak of the Midland dialect region, a smaller territory stretching westward and southwestward from its cultural and linguistic seed bed in central Pennsylvania, where English was first planted in the region, to northern Alabama. This region is divided into the North Midland (northern West Virginia, western Maryland, and most of Pennsylvania) and the South Midland (southern West Virginia, western Virginia, western North and South Carolina, eastern Kentucky, east Tennessee, north Georgia, and north Alabama). Other than sheer expanse, a diverse topography, and separation between local areas, several factors worked against Appalachia’s forming a distinct or cohesive dialect area. Settlement by different groups or varying concentrations of groups produced local variations. From the beginning internal migration has mixed the language habits of the English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other settler groups in various ways, leveling differences, especially in pronunciation. A new landscape and new needs gave rise to innovations in vocabulary.
Research by the American Linguistic Atlas Project, a systematic national survey of traditional vocabulary and pronunciation initiated around 1930, found only seventeen words and phrases by and large distinctive to the Midland region. These include bawl ‘a calf’s cry’, blinds ‘window shutters’, hull ‘to shell (beans or peas)’, and poke ‘paper bag’ (“She bought a poke of peanuts”). Six others are common to the North Midland (jag ‘armful of corn’; run ‘creek’) and five (e.g. jacket ‘vest’; fireboard ‘mantel’ (“Lydia set her clock proudly on the fireboard”) to the South Midland. However definitive in demarcating the region linguistically, few of these terms are commonly known or used today. Based on a national perspective and a much larger bank of evidence, the Dictionary of American Regional English has labeled 46 items and usages as “Appalachian” (e.g. check ‘a light meal,’ generation ‘an extended family,’ rainbird ‘the yellow-billed cuckoo’) and nearly 300 others as “southern Appalachian” (e.g. hand-going ‘consecutively,’ leather britches ‘a green bean threaded and hung up to dry,’ mountain boomer ‘a diminutive red squirrel’) because their distribution appears to be confined to or concentrated in those regions.
This relative scarcity of evidence has led scholars to question whether “Appalachian English” and “Southern Appalachian English” are geographical entities based on common usage or cultural ones more strongly linked to solidarity. Perhaps their strong sense of place, cohesive communities, and attachments to traditional lifestyles and values have made mountain people less willing to accommodate to mainstream culture. This resistance to change can be reflected in the tendency to retain speech habits even a generation or more after a person has moved to a metropolitan area such as Chicago, Detroit, or Cincinnati. Like people who stayed behind, migrants often consciously distinguish themselves from people outside their new communities, as in pronouncing Appalachia with the third syllable as lat rather than lay. The latter development has grown steadily since the 1960s, apparently in reaction to the pronunciation of the media and government officials.
In 1985 one Eastern Kentuckian wrote, “What I finally came to understand is that AppaLAYcha does not exist. At least, it doesn’t exist in the real world. The AppaLATCHans exist; even AppaLATCHa exists. But AppaLAYcha is a fiction. It is an idea created by politicians and reporters. It has no more physical reality than Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Africa or Ray Bradbury’s Mars.”
The presence of many archaisms in mountain speech has prompted more study of its origins than that of any other region. Three sources of this element have most frequently been proposed: “Elizabethan” England, eighteenth-century colonial American English, or Ulster (by way of the Scotch-Irish). It is easy to oversimplify such an issue because no type of speech came to North America without mixing with others immediately after arrival, because retentions represent only part of the larger story of any type of American speech, and because no type of American English, no matter how separate from the mainstream, has remained static.
Though more often than not been used loosely to mean “old-fashioned,” “Elizabethan” and “Shakespearean” refer, strictly speaking, to the period around 1600. Connecting this period to mountain speech has the greatest popularity but the least historical and linguistic support. Settlers from the British Isles did not begin arriving in Appalachia for another century and a half. They brought vocabulary found in Britain in general or to a lesser extent northern England (galluses ‘suspenders’, palings ‘fence posts’), western England (counterpane ‘bedspread’), and Scotland (chancy ‘doubtful’, sop ‘gravy’.)
The view of Elizabethan England as the source of mountain English was formulated and promoted by people from outside Appalachians who recognized some usages (afeared ‘afraid’) familiar from the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Some came to know mountain people firsthand and sought to counter negative stereotypes by highlighting positive qualities. Although this connection has little scholarly basis, it and similar ideas have flourished as cultural myths, possibly because the region retains immense value for Americans elsewhere as a repository of culture and tradition less affected by mass society and more closely tied to the past. Nonetheless, such a romantic notion has hardly saved Appalachia from neglect, marginalization, and exploitation.
For both pronunciations and grammatical patterns a better case can be made for roots from colonial American than for Elizabethan England. These include final -a pronounced as -y (opry ‘opera’, extry ‘extra’, as in “The soup needs an extry pinch of salt”) and the addition of r to some words (tater ‘tomato’, holler ‘hollow’. Blowed and knowed as the past tense and past participle of blow and know do not occur in Shakespeare’s writings but were fairly common for colonial arrivals to American shores. Such verb forms is still common in Appalachia, though they have long been considered nonstandard in the United States. Associated with the first two views is the alleged influence of geographic and cultural “isolation” on Appalachian speech. This idea is largely a myth, based on false beliefs that Appalachia is culturally hom*ogenous and that physical separation caused life to move slowly. Archaic speechways, along with traditional ballads, Jack Tales, and types of folk dancing and weaving supposedly show that Appalachian culture is static. Historians have argued that mountain communities typify rural America, however. While such traditions might seem to exemplify cultural preservations from centuries past, studies have found them to be ever-changing. Mountain people still write ballads to recount modern tragedies, disasters, and star-crossed love, but actually these are timeless themes, not archaic ones.
The third commonly cited source of Appalachian speech is from Ulster, the northernmost historical province of Ireland. Most of the 150,000 or more who left there in the eighteenth century settled in the American interior, becoming known as the Scotch-Irish. Many of them moved into the valleys and hills of Appalachia. Only traces of modern-day Appalachian pronunciation can be attributed to them, but their influence has been greater in vocabulary and grammar. Scotch-Irish vocabulary includes airish ‘chilly’ (“It was an awful irish day”), brickle ‘brittle’ (“The dry leaves were brickle and crumbled easily”), discomfit ‘to inconvenience’ (“I wouldn’t want to discomfit you”j), and ill ‘bad-tempered’ (“That dog is ill as a hornet”) The Ulster contribution to regional grammar has been more significant, as evidenced in the formation of words (by combining ’un ‘one’ with adjectives and pronouns (young’un, big’un, you’uns), phrases (need followed by a verb past participle, as in “That boy needs taught a lesson”; compound helping verbs (“I wonder if you might could help me”); and conjunctions, as with whenever for ‘at the time that’ (“Whenever I was young, people didn’t do such a thing”). The English of Appalachia resembles the language of Shakespeare’s England not nearly so much as that of eighteenth-century Ulster. Even so, only perhaps twenty percent of terms and usages not shared by the rest of the country can be traced to the British Isles. While this percentage is higher than for most other American varieties, it still indicates that the foremost component of all American varieties is new vocabulary. Borrowings and inventions are continually needed as speakers face new challenges of environment and culture.
Most terms identified as Appalachian by the Dictionary of American Regional English and other sources were actually born in America (bald ‘treeless area on a mountaintop’, flannel cake ‘pancake’). Of the seventeen Midland items identified by the American Linguistic Atlas Project, most are unambiguously American in origin and represent responses to the New World (lamp oil ‘kerosene’, sugar tree ‘sugar maple’). Six at most (piece ‘snack’, want in ‘want to go/come in’, as in “That dog doesn’t know whether he wants in or out”) may have come from Ulster (though much of the English of Ulster is shared with northern England and Scotland and is, historically speaking, derived from those regions).
Contributions traceable to other languages have been few. In contrast to an abundance of surnames, there is little evidence for German outside Pennsylvania, where one finds such words as smearcase ‘cottage cheese’ (from schmier ‘spread’ + Käse ‘cheese’. Irish Gaelic/Scottish Gaelic inheritance is also scant and consists mainly of vocabulary. Terms such as brogan ‘heavy, homemade leather shoe’, bonny clabber ‘curdled sour milk’, and muley ‘hornless cow’, had already been absorbed by English-speaking Scotch-Irish before they left Ireland, and no evidence for a community of Gaelic speakers in Appalachia has ever been documented. Other European languages, such as Spanish (doney ‘sweetheart’) and French, contributed even less to Appalachian speech. The lack of influence from Cherokee, even on the local English of western North Carolina, is both striking and puzzling. Because so much medicinal and other lore was absorbed by Europeans from the Cherokee, as well as the names of so many rivers, mountains, and other topographical features, there is no ready explanation for the absence of common vocabulary such as Cherokee names for plants (other than sochan for an edible wild green).
Many features of Appalachian grammar are found elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, but occur with greater frequency in the hills. Examples include a- as a prefix on verb present participles (a-goin, a-comin’) and possessive pronouns with the suffix -n (hern, hisn, yourn, as in “a book of yourn”), came from England. Emigrants from Ulster introduced others, such as personal pronouns hit ‘it’ and you’uns ‘you (plural)’ and all after pronouns to indicate inclusion: who all and what all (“Who all came and what all did they say?”) Verbs having the same form for the past tense and past participle as well as present tense (come, eat, run) and the addition of -est to form the superlative of adjectives ending in -ing (workingest ‘working the hardest or the most’, as “the workingest fellow in town”; or singingest) exhibit a general ancestry from the British Isles, while the reversal of word elements (everwhat ‘whatever’, everwho ‘whoever’, as in “Everwho hears that will be surprised”) and the use of prepositions in series (“There was several houses on up around on Mill Creek”) are apparently American developments.
Pronunciations that represent more recent developments but shared with the Deep South include prolonging and splitting vowels into two syllables (red as re-uhd or ray-uhd, rib as ree-uhb), a pattern sometimes known as the “southern drawl”); shifting of accent to the first syllable of a word (IN-surance, PO-leece); modification of “long I” to ah in certain contexts, so that my right side sounds like mah raht sahd, wire rhymes with either car or war, and tile rhymes with tall, and pronouncing the same vowel sound in word pairs such as pen/pin and gem/Jim.
Mountain speech has retained or created senses of words unfamiliar elsewhere in the United States that can result in miscommunication. In the Great Smoky Mountains someone might be heard to say, “A lot of mountain people are kind of backward, but I don’t care to talk to nobody.” By this is meant that while other people are shy, the speaker does not mind (in fact, enjoys) conversing with strangers. People who says they are “hard to hear” may mean, depending on the context, that they are soft-spoken or that they have difficulty hearing others. Other common words having variant meanings in the mountains include several ‘quite a few’ (“We picked several blackberries this summer”), clever ‘hospitable,’ (“You’ll find people very clever here in the mountains,” and ill ‘bad-tempered’.
Many social factors can influence an individual’s speech, such as the formality of a given situation, the respective ages, levels of education, and so on. Less educated speakers are more likely to use speech considered typically Appalachian, though some features of pronunciation are used at all social or educational levels (except in northern parts of Appalachia). Examples include modification of “long I” to ah in words like time and my and the pronunciation of words like pen and gem as pin and Jim. These are completely “standard” in Appalachia and in much of the South.
Vocabulary varies mainly by subregion within Appalachia or by the age or “ruralness” of the speaker. More modern, mainstream terms have been rapidly displacing older, rural counterparts, especially for younger inhabitants. A study of students at a small college in Western North Carolina found a dramatic loss of regional vocabulary; for instance, living room, gutters, mantel, and attic had completely replaced big house, eaves trough, fireboard, and loft.
Because it brings speakers into contact with national norms, formal education enables speakers, especially younger ones, to shift between varieties or styles of English according to the situation. But it can also produce self-consciousness or defensiveness about differences between one’s “home English” and one’s “school English,” pitting the values of family and place against those of the larger world, which emphasize social mobility. Because of the pressure to conform to local norms in much of rural Appalachia, an individual’s level of education may not strongly influence the way he or she speaks.
Too often one still finds the view that American dialects such as those found in Appalachia are only modifications of “Standard English incorrectly learned” due to backwardness or a lack of intelligence. Educators and linguists have disputed these views for a long time, but the association of mountain English with impoverished, low-status speakers has resisted arguments of its respectable heritage. Unfortunately, sometimes mountain people have also accepted the negative evaluation of their English.
No region, community, or person is hom*ogeneous in speech, of course. Variation and change are natural and universal. The speech of Appalachia has been shaped in different ways at different places, as, for example, through contact with nearby lowlands, by migration into or from different areas, by the experience of cultures coming into contact, and perhaps above all, the constant adaptation by speakers to meet their changing needs. As elsewhere, varieties of English in Appalachia will continue to bend somewhat to the forces standardizing American culture. However, in the end, they will endure because of the cultural cohesion and the sense of community and regional identity it provides to its speakers, even in the face of persistent misconceptions and pressure to conform.
References:Craig M. Carver, American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987); Frederic G. Cassidy, Joan Hall, et al., eds., Dictionary of American Regional English (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985–2012); Josiah H. Combs, “Old, Early, and Elizabethan English in the Southern Mountains.” Dialect Notes (4: 283-97, 1916); Hans Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1949); Michael Montgomery, “How Scotch-Irish is Your English?” Journal of East Tennessee History 77(supplement): 65-91, 2006); Michael Montgomery, “Myths: How a Hunger for Roots Shapes Our Notions about Appalachian English,” Now and Then (Summer 2000); Michael Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).
African American Appalachian English
Kirk Hazen, West Virginia University
The dialect features of the English of Appalachia can vary significantly between ethnic groups. As much as researchers have examined variation in the region’s English, only recently have they begun to analyze the speech of African Americans there.
From studies in NC and WV linguists have identified several characteristics of African American English in the region. As with all living varieties, the language of African Americans is changing. Speakers born in the last decade of the nineteenth century had speech patterns different from those of speakers at the end of the twentieth century. Even so, there are often discernible features used by African Americans in Appalachia.
Generally speaking, African Americans in Appalachia can be described as having three types of features: one type found only in African American English; a second type shared with lowland Southern varieties; and a third type shared by African American and European American Appalachian speakers. Even so, research has shown there to be local variation according to Communities of Practice, which can influence speech patterns at least as much if not more than ethnic or regional divisions.
The first type of feature includes absence of the copula verb is (e.g. she nice for she is nice). Another verb variation, third-person singular –s absence, as in the dog bark_, has been found for some African American Appalachians. Some African Americans also use be in the traditional fashion to indicate an event happening on a repeated or regular basis, as in “Town be full on Friday and Saturday nights.”
The second group includes features that reflect an affinity with many varieties in the Deep South. One such feature is making the final r sound more vowel-like (four becomes fo-uh), and an even more common feature is pronouncing the vowels in words like pin and pen the same. Throughout the South the two-part <i> vowel tends to become a single vowel in words such as mine (pronounced mahn), mile (mahl), and (bahd). In the past this sound pattern diverged in words such as like, light, and nice, which some European Americans pronounced lahk, laht, and nahs, while African Americans often did not use ah before the consonants k, t, or s. Researchers have found that some African American Appalachians have more recently adopted this pattern in all sound environments. Overall, it is in the combination of the first two types of dialect features that a discernible Appalachian African American English can be recognized.
A third group of features can be found in most varieties of Appalachia from West Virginia down into southern parts of the region. Some of these features are vernacular, such as using was with plural subjects (e.g. we was there), where as others are fairly standard in the region, such as pronouncing l almost like a vowel (oh or uh) at the end of words such as ball and boil.
English varies regionally within Appalachia. For example, West Virginia since its formation in 1863 has been divided into northern and southern cultures as a result of alliances during the Civil War, and the state tends to have a sharp dialect boundary.
African American speech reflects this divide also, as in pronouncing the vowel in mine and bide as mahn and bahd is more frequent for African Americans in southern West Virginia. Cultural attitudes tend to follow these dialect divisions: African Americans in southern West Virginia view themselves as both Southerners and African American, while those in northern areas identify themselves as African American only.
The patterns and features of English spoken by African Americans in Appalachia provide evidence for the inherent richness and diversity of both African American English and Appalachian Englishes. They permit Appalachian Englishes to be defined more completely as a collection of varieties differing by subregion, generation, ethnicity, and local Community of Practice.
References: Becky Childs and Christine Mallinson, “African American English in Appalachia,” English World-Wide 25:27-50 (2004); Kirk Hazen, “The Final Days of Appalachian Heritage Language,” in Language Variation and Change in the American Midland, ed. by Beth Simon and Thomas Murray, 129-50 (Philadelphia: Benjamins. 2006); Christine Mallinson and Becky Childs, “Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistics,” Gender & Language 1:173-206 (2007); Walt Wolfram, “African American Speech in Southern Appalachia,” in Talking Appalachian, ed. by Amy D. Clark and Nancy Hayward, 81-93 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013).
David S. Walls, Sonoma State University
Just as the word Appalachia is generally pronounced Ap-pa-LATCH-a in the southern mountains, but more commonly ap-pa-LAY-cha in the rest of the country, so too is there some dispute over the origin of the name given to the region.
Legend has it that Hernando de Soto or members of his 1539 expedition named the Appalachian Mountains. Surviving accounts of the de Soto expedition, however, offer no evidence that the conquistador or his companions intended to designate the eastern mountain chain for the Apalachee Indians, whom they encountered far to the south in what is now northern Florida. The first European contact with the Apalachee had been made by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca’s expedition in 1528 in the vicinity of Tampa Bay, Florida. One derivation of the name argues that in the Muscogee language apala means “great sea,” and combined with the personal participle chi, apalache means “those by the sea.” Apparently early mapmakers, confused by vague stories of locations and distances, transposed the territory of the Apalachee farther north.
Diego Gutierrez was the first mapmaker to record a variation of Appalachian. On his map of America, published in 1562, the region “Apalchen” appears to the north of a mountain range, far from Florida. Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, an artist who accompanied the French Huguenot expedition to Florida in 1564, never actually traveled north to the mountains, but he painted a scene of Indians collecting gold from streams running from the “Apalatcy Mountains” and also designated a village as “Apalatchi.” Le Moyne’s map was published in 1591 and, despite its errors, influenced many subsequent maps, including Gerardus Mercator’s 1606 map, a standard for the next fifty years.
During the eighteenth century, the southern half of the eastern mountain chain was known as the Appalachians and the northern half the Alleghenies, with the overall designation alternating between the two. In a letter to the editor of the Knickerbocker in 1839, Washington Irving suggested that Appalachia or Alleghenia might be a more appropriate name for the United States, probably the first appearance in print of the term Appalachia. Geographer Arnold Henry Guyot established the scientific and popular usage for the entire mountain range with his article “On the Appalachian Mountain system” in 1861.
With the geographic nomenclature firmly established, Appalachia began to be defined as a cultural region and a social and economic problem area. Before the Civil War, there was little to distinguish the way of life in the Appalachians from life generally on the American frontier. Local color writers discovered the region in the mid-1870s, and educators and missionaries sought to define the southern Appalachians as a social problem area deserving the attention of church home mission boards and private philanthropic foundations. Berea College President William Goodell Frost made influential delineations of the region in 1894, as did John C. Campbell in The Southern Highlander and His Homeland in 1921. The federal government issued a comprehensive survey in 1935 (Economic and Social Problems and Conditions of the Southern Appalachians) and the Ford Foundation supported an updated survey in 1962 (The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey). Since 1965, official designations have followed the Appalachian Regional Development Act and its subsequent amendments. Political considerations have extended the definition from physiographic highlands to lower-lying areas with similar socioeconomic profiles, as in northeastern Mississippi.
References: William P. Cumming, The Southeast in Early Maps (1958); David S. Walls, “On the Naming of Appalachia,” in An Appalachian Symposium, ed. J. W. Williamson, 56-76 (Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium, 1977).
Appalachian English and Ozark English
Michael Ellis, Missouri State University
Although separated by several hundred miles, Appalachian English and Ozark English have long shared a close association in descriptions of language in the southern highlands. Writers have often assumed that the dialects of the two regions are similar because most of the original settlers of the ozarks came from the southern Appalachians. Although precise origins are difficult to determine, nineteenth-century census records indicate that natives of Tennessee and Kentucky were especially numerous among early residents of the Ozarks, and recent linguistic analyses have indeed confirmed that Ozark English and Appalachian English are very closely related varieties.
Early treatments of Ozark English, similar to those of Appalachian English, focused on the supposed archaic quality of the region’s dialects. As early as the 1890s, writers linked the regions in articles about the survival of “Shakespearean” or “Elizabethan” English.
The earliest systematic linguistic description of any part of the Ozark region appears in Rachel B. Faries’s A Word Geography of Missouri (1967), which compares folk vocabulary collected in Missouri with that compiled in Hans Kurath’s Word Geography of the Eastern United States (1949). The study is limited to vocabulary, and the Ozark portion is confined to southwestern Missouri, but Faries’s work suggests that the Ozarks are an extension of Kurath’s South Midland speech area, a dialect region strongly associated with Appalachian English. South Midland terms common in the Missouri Ozarks include red-worm “earthworm”; brute and male brute “bull”; salat “greens”; johnny house “privy”; turn “amount,” as in “a turn of corn” is the amount you would take to a mill”; middlins and middlin meat “salt pork (the side of bacon)”; tow sack “burlap bag”; and fireboard “mantel.”
In his American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography (1987), Craig Carver suggests that a truly close relationship between Appalachian English and Ozark English folk vocabulary is limited to the Arkansas portion of the Ozarks. Some characteristic terms include brickle “brittle”; bull tongue “plow”; the preposition fernent “near to,” “against,” or “opposite”; goober pea “peanut”; jarfly “cicada”; and redeye gravy.
More comprehensive studies, the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (1986–92) and Variation and Change in Geographically Isolated Communities: Appalachian English and ozark English (1988), have disclosed overall similarities beyond vocabulary and indicate significant phonological and grammatical links between the two dialects. Ozark English seems to be closely related to dialects in the eastern half of Tennessee but not to the dialects of western Tennessee and eastern Arkansas.
Appalachian English and Ozark English share features that set these dialects apart from other varieties of American English. Characteristic pronunciations include ghostes, th’owed, and potater, as well as oncet “once,” idn’t “isn’t,” hit “it,” and far “fire.” Grammatical features include a-prefixing, as in “I’m a-goin’ home”; completive done, as in “He’s done been here”; double modal helping verbs, as in “might could”; liketa, as in “He liketa died”; positive anymore, as in “He works there anymore”; and present-tense agreement of plural noun subjects with is or verbs with the suffix -s, as in “people is,” “people likes,” “my two brothers lives,” and “schools has.” There are indications that some features may be declining more rapidly in Ozark English than in Appalachian English.
The dialects in southern Appalachia and in the Ozarks are closely related; however, this does not indicate that there is one Southern Mountain dialect, with Ozark English a simple extension of Appalachian English. A more realistic view is that they are two relatively conservative descendants of a single dialect that was developing in the southern Appalachians during the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries and was carried by migrating settlers westward into the Ozarks, where it has developed independently since the nineteenth century.
References: Donna Christian, Walt Wolfram, and Nanjo Dube, Variation and Change in Geographically Isolated Communities: Appalachian English and Ozark English, Publication of the American Dialect Society 74 (1988); Lee Pederson et al., eds., Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986–92).
Appalachian English in Literature
Michael Ellis, Missouri State University
Since the early nineteenth century, writers have portrayed spoken language in literature with Appalachian characters and settings. Many early literary dialects are of doubtful authenticity, and their overuse has helped create negative regional stereotypes. On the other hand, since evidence of earlier Appalachian English is limited, literary sources sometimes provide important clues to the development of dialects in the region. Insight into the linguistic or the social significance of Appalachian English in literature requires an understanding of literary dialects and their evolution over the last century and a half.
By the 1830s, American literary dialects had become fairly conventional. Writers employed an extensive common stock of words, phonetic spellings intended to represent words, and grammatical forms to represent rustic speech without any specific regional identification. James Fenimore Cooper was perhaps the single most influential American writer to represent the speech of frontier characters, beginning with The Pioneers (1823), the first of his Leatherstocking novels. Cooper’s novels, set mainly on the New York frontier, abound in spellings such as larn, sarmon, and sarpent, as well as skear “scare,” nater “nature,” idee “idea,” sitch “such,” afeard “afraid,” and wust “worst.” Nonstandard grammatical forms include verbs such as know’d, catched, teached, seed “saw,” fit “fought,” and druv “drove.” Other grammatical forms include the pronoun yourn, the demonstrative them, as in “them fellers,” and the prepositions afore, again “against,” atween, and betwixt.
In the 1830s and 1840s, authors drew from this?? common literary dialect in works with settings from New England to Arkansas. Other examples from this common stock include phonetic spellings such as swaller, tater, and yeller; Ihoss “horse”; bile, spile, and pizon “boil,” “spoil,” and “poison”; verb forms such as hearn “heard,” rid “rode,” and writ “wrote”; a-goin’ and other words formed with an a- prefix; the possessive pronouns hisn, hern, and ourn; and words such as chimbly “chimney,” yarb “herb,” and catamount and painter “panther.” Most writers also employed a technique known as eye-dialect—spellings such as wuz, sez, licker, minnit, and wimmin that represent universal pronunciations and have no basis in phonological differences. Eye-dialect was often used for comic effect and served to emphasize the backwardness and illiteracy of characters.
The existence of a common stock of forms does not mean that all nineteenth-century authors employed exactly the same literary dialect, only that many writers borrowed rather than invented the features they used. Indeed, the primary purpose of a literary dialect was not to create an accurate record of regional speech but rather to define the social position, or perhaps the social divergence, of fictional characters. Contrasts between dialect speakers and non-dialect speakers delineated broad cultural differences: rural (or frontier) versus urban, uneducated versus educated, even irrational versus rational.
By the mid-nineteenth century, dialect had become a convenient method for revealing social status through the use of dialogue. Before the Civil War, examples of Appalachian English based on actual observation were rare and limited to scattered references in literature by northern travel writers such as Anne Newport Royall, James Kirke Paulding, and Frederick Law Olmsted. By the 1830s, however, a fictional version of Appalachian English began to appear. Paulding, for example, used literary dialect in The Lion of the West (1831), a comic drama partly inspired by the life of David Crockett. There is little difference between the dialect of Paulding’s literary frontiersman, Nimrod Wildfire, and that of Cooper’s Leatherstocking.
Slightly more accurate is William A. Caruthers’s The Kentuckian in New York (1834). Caruthers was a native Virginian and presumably had a more extensive knowledge than Paulding of the Appalachian region and its speech. He used at least one grammatical feature characteristic of present-day Appalachian English: present tense suffix -s on a verb with a plural noun subject, as in “But I’m told the yankees always sings a psalm before they go to battle” and “Our gals and boys stands up before the parson a few minutes.”
The life of David Crockett also inspired the anonymous author or authors of various Crockett Almanacs, which began appearing soon after Crockett’s death in 1836 at the Alamo and remained popular through the 1850s. These authors, many of whom were unfamiliar with the region, borrowed their literary dialect from earlier works, including those of Cooper and Paulding, as well as James Hall’s Letters from the West (1828), which includes a character described as “half horse and half alligator,” and The Western Souvenir, a Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829 (1828), which featured another frontiersman who could “whip his weight in wild cats.” The literary dialect in the Crockett Almanacs is, however, generally undistinguished, with dozens of forms such as enuff, laffing, speek, throte, tale “tail,” and hare “hair.” Although the Crockett Almanacs may not represent an authentic version of Appalachian English, they were probably influential in setting the tone for much of what would follow.
Of more linguistic interest are the literary dialects used in works by native southerners from the 1830s through the 1860s, including the border romances of William Gilmore simms and examples of the Old Southwestern humor genre by Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, William Tappen Thompson, George Washington Harris, and Harden E. Taliaferro. Harris and Taliaferro are of particular interest since their works have specific Appalachian settings, making them among the earliest examples of Appalachian literature and certainly the earliest to contain extensive literary representations of Appalachian English. Taliaferro’s Fisher’s River (North Carolina) Scenes and Characters (1859) is set in northwestern North Carolina, while Harris’s Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool” (1867) is set in East Tennessee.
Generally speaking, native writers used at least some regionally distinctive features in their literary dialects, while northern authors portraying southern dialects did not. For example, most southern authors regularly employed present tense suffix -s on verbs with plural noun subjects (as in the examples above from Caruthers), a regionally distinctive feature absent from the work of northern authors.
Harris’s Sut Lovingood stories are especially interesting from a linguistic standpoint since he used so many nonstandard features that were original rather than borrowed. Harris began contributing comic stories to William T. Porter’s national weekly Spirit of the Times in the 1840s, and most of these stories later appeared in the 1867 Sut Lovingood volume. Judging Harris’s authenticity presents challenges because his literary dialect is so dense and contains many features that are probably not authentic. Like the authors of the Crockett Almanacs, Harris made extensive use of eye-dialect, comic mispronunciations, and malapropisms (dogratipe “daguerreotype”; Delicious Tremenjous “delirium tremens”; furnitur-takers “fornicators”). A typical sentence, taken here from “Sut Lovingood’s Daddy, Acting Horse,” reveals a mixture of phonetic spellings and eye-dialect forms: “When we got the bridil fix’d ontu dad, don’t yu bleve he sot in tu chompin hit jis like a rale hoss, an’ tried tu bite me on the arm (he allers wer a mos’ complikated durned ole fool, an’ mam sed so when he warnt about”). In addition to the phonetic spellings bleve, chompin, jis, rale, an’, mos’, ole, and hoss, there are nearly as many examples of eye-dialect: bridil, fix’d, ontu, yu, tu, complikated, and sed.
Although Harris probably borrowed much of his literary dialect (“he . . . wer,” “he warnt,” “sot,” and “allers” in the passage above), other usages, such as hit “it,” are uncommon among his contemporaries. Some features used only by Harris, such as the plural forms ghostez and postez, are distinctive of Appalachian English. The most significant aspect of Harris’s literary dialect is his use of folk vocabulary, since by comparison his contemporaries were fairly reticent about using distinctive regional expressions. Words such as chinkipin, cowcumbers, dulcimore, furnint, gallinipper, gouber peas, lightning bugs, mud dauber, muley cow, and roasin ear are among the dozens found in Harris’s work. Indeed, his use of folk vocabulary was so extensive and often so obscure that one modern editor included a lengthy glossary at the end of his edition of Sut Lovingood.
The relative importance of Harris’s work as a source of evidence about earlier Appalachian English is problematic. Following methods outlined by Sumner Ives in his 1950 article “A Theory of Literary Dialect,” writers have sometimes attempted to authenticate the works of individual authors by comparing selected features from a literary source with evidence from modern linguistic studies. These investigations generally focus on pronunciation rather than vocabulary or grammar, and they usually fail to recognize the conventional nature of literary dialects. While some of Harris’s vocabulary compares well with regional forms described in the Dictionary of American Regional English and the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States, others do not. Harris perhaps best represents the end of the first stage in the evolution of Appalachian English in literature: the comically exaggerated, first-person narrative intended primarily for a regional audience. His work is probably the last published fiction in the nineteenth century that provides a useful source of linguistic evidence.
In the same year that Sut Lovingood appeared, Sidney Lanier published Tiger Lilies, a novel set in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and reminiscent of the border romances of Simms. Although Lanier was a native southerner, his literary version of Appalachian English is fairly conventional and derives from the previous generation of southern writers. Lanier’s work is, however, a good example of the tendency among nineteenth-century fiction writers to contrast the standard speech of educated outsiders with the dialect of Appalachian natives.
Local colorist Mary Noailles Murfree was probably the most influential author of the postbellum period to use a literary version of Appalachian English. Under the pseudonym “Charles Egbert Craddock,” Murfree began publishing short stories with Appalachian settings in the 1870s, although her real success came with the publication of In the Tennessee Mountains (1884), soon followed by The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885). Though she made heavy use of literary dialect, like Lanier, she borrowed most of the features she used. She did not, however, reproduce the characteristic grammatical features that would have given her work authenticity. Instead, she relied upon frequent use of a fairly limited number of phonetic spellings and nonstandard grammatical forms.
Murfree was not the only late-nineteenth-century American writer to employ literary dialect, but a comparison of her work with that of her contemporaries reveals more extensive use of it. Murfree’s work also shows a basic discontinuity between genre and style. In subject matter and tone, her work is akin to that of Simms and Lanier; her frequent use of dialect, however, has much more in common with the Crockett Almanacs and Sut Lovingood. Moreover, her novels were aimed at a general rather than regional audience, and since her fiction was romantic rather than humorous, she relied much less on eye-dialect and much more on phonetic spellings.
For a northern audience unfamiliar with the actual dialect, Murfree’s technique may have contributed to a mistaken impression that her representation of speech was more realistic than it actually was. In any given passage of dialogue, Murfree used two or three times as many nonstandard features as writers who portrayed other regional dialects such as James Whitcomb Riley, Hamlin Garland, or Sarah Orne Jewett. Murfree used four to five times as many nonstandard features as Mark Twain did in Huckleberry Finn, published the same year as In the Tennessee Mountains.
A short passage from In the Tennessee Mountains illustrates the density of Murfree’s technique: “Vander war a good blacksmith fur the mountings, but they sot him ter l’arnin’ thar. They ’lowed, though, ez he war pearter’n the peartest. He got ter be powerful pop’lar with all the gyards an’ authorities, an’ sech.” In this passage nearly half the words have nonstandard forms. Her only contemporaries to use literary dialect so heavily were those who portrayed African American speech, such as Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris. Murfree’s literary dialect helped exaggerate the supposed cultural and linguistic divergence of her Appalachian characters.
John Fox Jr. adopted techniques used by Murfree in turn-of-the-century works such as The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come (1903) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1908). In his use of literary dialect, Fox was somewhat more restrained than Murfree, although the nonstandard features contained in his representation of Appalachian English were still excessive in comparison to American writers in general. The importance of Fox’s literary dialect, however, goes beyond perpetuation of regional stereotypes through exaggeration. Fox was instrumental in establishing the notion that Appalachian English was a particularly archaic dialect as a consequence of extreme geographic isolation. For example, in his early novella A Mountain Europa (1892), Fox describes a moonshiner’s daughter, Easter Hicks, as one “upon whose lips lingered words and forms of speech that Shakespeare heard and used.” Fox also suggested an archaic Scotch-Irish influence in a 1901 Scribner’s article in which he observed, “Scotch ballads are said to be sung with a Scotch accent.”
The literary dialects used by Murfree and Fox are of little help in understanding earlier Appalachian English. Both borrowed extensively from earlier writers and are not particularly consistent with each other, but they are important because they influenced popular misconceptions about Appalachian English. Through their fiction, mountaineers and their language became inseparable.
Since the 1930s the techniques used by authors to represent Appalachian English have shifted away from the exaggeration characteristic of nineteenth-century authors. More recent writers who have used Appalachian settings have tended toward restraint in their literary dialects. A partial list of works published from the 1940s to the 1960s includes James Still’s River of Earth (1940), Jesse Stuart’s Men of the Mountains (1941), and Harriette Simpson Arnow’s The Dollmaker (1954), all set in eastern Kentucky; James Agee’s A Death in the Family (1957), Wilma Dykeman’s The Tall Woman (1962), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper (1965), all set in East Tennessee; and John Ehle’s The Land Breakers (1964), set in western North Carolina.
These authors all depicted dialect speakers but tended to suggest dialect through the occasional use of phonetic spellings or nonstandard grammatical features. This more subtle literary version of Appalachian English is apparent in a passage from Arnow’s The Dollmaker: “Reuben warn’t lyen. He’s had a rifle since he was ten years old. They’s bear and deer clost to our place back home. We’re right nigh the edge of a gover’ment game preserve. One year the deer eat up my late corn.”
The reaction against regional stereotypes, including the overuse of literary dialect, is characteristic of most recent Appalachian literature, and since the 1970s the trend seems increasingly to be toward a very minimal use of literary dialect. A selective list of works that generally reflect this trend includes Lee Smith’s Black Mountain Breakdown (1980), set in southwestern Virginia; Denise Giardina’s The Unquiet Earth (1992), set in West Virginia; Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain (1997), set in western North Carolina; and Sharyn McCrumb’s The Ballad of Frankie Silver (1998), set along the Tennessee–North Carolina border.
It would be a mistake to overlook the stylistic diversity in the growing body of Appalachian literature, since writers continue to use a variety of techniques in portraying the regional speech of their characters. Ultimately, though, literary dialects are not the same as speech, and they are of very limited value as sources of linguistic evidence. Literary representations of Appalachian English are probably much more valuable in revealing how the work of nineteenth-century authors established common perceptions of the region and its speech.
References: Paul Hull Bowdre, Jr., “Eye Dialect as a Literary Device,” in A Various Language: Perspectives on American Dialects, ed. Juanita V. Williamson and Virginia M. Burke (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971); Michael Ellis, “Literary Dialect as Linguistic Evidence: Subject-Verb Concord in Nineteenth-Century Southern Literature,” American Speech 69:128-44 (1994); Graham Shorrocks, “Non-Standard Dialect Literature and Popular Culture,” in Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen, ed. Juhani Klemola, Merja Kytö, and Matti Rissanen University of Bamberg Studies in English Linguistics 38 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter 1996).
Appalachian English in the Urban Midwest
Bridget Anderson, Old Dominion University
Out-migration has been a feature of Appalachian life for more than two hundred years, in the nineteenth century especially to Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas. With the advent of better roads and means of transport, significant numbers from Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Kentucky began moving in the 1920s to closer destinations like Lexington and Cincinnati and then Midwestern cities like Detroit and Chicago. This migration peaked in the 1950s, when one million people left the region, especially for factory work, in a larger movement from the rural South called the Great Migration. Southern Appalachia registered a net loss of population for the first and only time in its history. Migration was a difficult choice because of the strong kinship ties and cultural cohesiveness of rural mountain communities, but remaining in the mountains often meant a life of unemployment or poverty. Economic survival and success came at the price of emotional pain, but many migrants and their descendants minimized this by taking the cultural and speech patterns with them and maintaining family and social connections with the mountains decades after they left.
Appalachian English has common features wherever it is spoken, including in migrant communities in the Midwest. Initial unstressed syllables are often deleted, as in taters “potatoes” and maters “tomatoes.” Another important pronunciation is that of “long i” in words such as side. In most of the country, the vowel usually consists of two sounds: ah as in father and ee as in beet. In Appalachian English, the second sound is absent, meaning that pie and right sound like pah and raht. Words like tire and fire are pronounced tar and far. Words ending in the unstressed “long o” sound are pronounced in er, as in holler “hollow” and tobaccer “tobacco.” Words ending in an unstressed final sound are pronounced with ee, as in extry “extra” and Georgy “Georgia.” The sound system of Appalachian English persists among migrant groups who have been in the Midwest for decades.
The grammar of Appalachian English also differs from most other varieties of English. For example, Appalachian migrants in Detroit, as well as speakers remaining in the mountains, sometimes add an uh sound to the beginning of words ending in -in’, as in a-talkin’ and a-runnin’. Both groups make irregular verbs into regular ones, meaning that knowed and throwed or th’owed become the past tense and past participle of know and throw. Appalachian English speakers use some irregular verbs in only one or two forms as principal parts rather than three, as for (do, done, done instead of do, did, done) and give (give, give, give instead of give, gave, given). Appalachian English in the urban North and in the mountains employs double helping verbs, as in I might could go “I might be able to go” and I might should go “Maybe I should go,” and two-word phrases that intensify an activity or a characteristic, as in She’s got a right smart temper “She’s got a very bad temper” and The old Griggs place burnt plumb down “The old Griggs house burned all the way to the ground.” Another common feature is the use of multiple negatives, as in I ain’t seen nobody fix nothin’ a-tall “I haven’t seen anyone fix anything at all” and Ain’t nobody can get on there “No one can get a job there.” Many Appalachian migrants in the Midwest also maintain the pronoun you’uns “you (plural).”
In Midwestern cities people continue to use such features of pronunciation and grammar to indicate their ties to the mountains, but their Appalachian speech makes them stand out in the Midwest. Because many of these features are stigmatized outside the region, speakers of Appalachian English are frequently stereotyped in the Midwest, where both whites and African Americans often refer to them as hillbillies.
References: James S. Brown and George F. Hillery, Jr., “The Great Migration, 1940-1960" in The Southern Appalachian Region: A Survey ed. by Thomas R. Ford, 54-78 (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1962); Harold F. Farwell Jr. and J. Karl Nicholas, eds., Smoky Mountain Voices: A Lexicon of Southern Appalachian Speech Based on the Research of Horace Kephart (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); Hans Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949); Michael Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004); Philip J. Obermiller, “Migration,” in Richard Straw and H. Tyler Blethen, ed. High Mountains Rising (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Cratis D. Williams, Southern Mountain Speech, ed. by Loyal Jones and Jim Wayne Miller (Berea, KY: Berea College Press,1992).
Attitudes toward Appalachian English
Clare J. Dannenberg, University of Alaska, Anchorage
Appalachian English has long been a stigmatized language variety in American culture. Many non-Appalachians often view Appalachian English as a quaint, antiquated type of English akin to Elizabethan English, while maintaining that it is substandard and indicates a lack of proper education. For native Appalachians, however, attitudes toward their own language are considerably more complex.
Mainstream attitudes toward Appalachian English build on social stereotypes that have been ingrained into American society for more than a century and reinforced by modern mass media. Recent images include the 1960s television show The Beverly Hillbillies and the syndicated comic strip Li’l Abner, in which the characters are quite likeable and even possess a certain country wit, resourcefulness, and charm, yet invariably display an ignorance of the wider world and a lack of formal education. These stereotype-reinforcing images create a link to Appalachian (especially southern Appalachian) culture directly through the dialect of the characters. Once the language has gained negative associations, the very use of it can be exploited to convey further stereotypes of the culture. Thus, mainstream attitudes toward Appalachian English are deep-rooted social prejudices.
Even the pronunciation of the region’s name has been a distinguishing characteristic of Appalachian English, as this humorous poem dedicated to reminding non-natives how to produce it attests:
“Snake,” said Eve,
“If you try to deceive,
I’ll throw this apple-atcha.”
Just as for outsiders an Appalachian dialect conjures up stereotypes and cultural prejudices about the speaker, many native Appalachians decide from the pronunciation of the region’s name whether or not the speaker is a community insider endowed with all of the defining and valued characteristics of Appalachian culture, including integrity and morality. Native attitudes toward Appalachian English are so indicative of group membership and positive community status within the region that Appalachian speakers often strive to maintain their dialect despite negative associations in mainstream culture, even when living outside the region. For example, a 1997 sociolinguistic study of Appalachian speakers transplanted to urban Ohio revealed that despite being surrounded by a more mainstream speech group with overt language prejudices, Appalachian speakers retained covert prestige language norms in line with non-relocated Appalachians.
Strong symbolic ties between language and group membership, however, can create complex issues with respect to native attitudes toward Appalachian English. Native Appalachians are not always comfortable with their language. While some speakers of Appalachian English, such as those in the Ohio study, actively retain their dialect, others attempt to conform their language to the mainstream. College students from Appalachia enrolled at non-Appalachian universities often renegotiate their identities in order to become socially acceptable. As their identities shift, so do their dialects, creating “identity ambivalence” for them and marking them as “elite outsiders” to their home community. Their shift in attitude away from Appalachian culture and its speech habits puts them in line with the mainstream, despite the loss of community status.
References: Rosina Lippi-Green, English with an Accent: Language, Ideology, and Discrimination in the United States, 1st ed. (New York: Routledge, 1997); Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: 1976).
Bridget Anderson, Old Dominion University
Cherokee is a member of the Southern branch of the Iroquois language family and is related to Mohawk, Seneca, and other Northern Iroquoian languages spoken in New York and Ontario. When Europeans began moving into the southern Appalachians in the eighteenth century, the Cherokee nation occupied much of western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and northern Georgia and sometimes ranged as far north as Virginia and Kentucky. By the early 1800s a shift to Cherokee and English bilingualism had begun among the Cherokee, and since the early twentieth century a radical shift to English monolingualism has taken place.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, less than 10 percent of North Carolina Cherokee, primarily middle-aged and older members, spoke the language, which is considered endangered. Major dialects are still found in areas of North Carolina reserved for the Cherokee by the federal government. There are about 1,000 speakers of the Kituwah (or Middle) dialect of the Qualla Cherokee of Swain and Jackson Counties, North Carolina, and close to 150 who speak the Overhill (or Western) dialect of the Snowbird Cherokee of Graham County. About 10,000 Cherokee speakers reside in Oklahoma, descendants of those forcibly marched west during the tragic Trail of Tears in 1838–39.
Much of this decline of the language is attributable to prejudices of the dominant American culture. Into the 1950s Cherokee children could be beaten or punished severely if they spoke their ancestral language in federally run boarding schools, which had active policies designed to eradicate Cherokee language and culture. This treatment discouraged many Cherokee people from teaching the language to their own children for fear that they too would be punished and humiliated.
Written Cherokee uses a syllabary that is remarkable among written languages in that it was apparently developed by a single person, Sequoyah. Also known as George Gist, Sequoyah was born in 1760 west of Chilhowee Mountain in Tennessee. Though illiterate himself, Sequoyah was inspired to devise a system for writing Cherokee through his fascination with the “talking leaves” used by white traders communicating in English. Using both invented and borrowed characters, he experimented for twelve years and by 1821 had assigned symbols to the eighty-five sounds and sound combinations still used in Cherokee.
Within a year the Cherokee Nation adopted the syllabary as its official writing system. According to nineteenth-century ethnologist James Mooney, a Cherokee speaker could learn to read and write the language in a few months, and thousands quickly became literate. By 1828 a Cherokee press had been established, publishing the Cherokee Phoenix (a weekly newspaper using the syllabary) and translations of the Bible and other books. Although a majority of Cherokee use the syllabary, Cherokee can also be written with English letters. The syllabary consists of six vowel sounds, the consonant s, and seventy-eight combinations of consonants and vowels. Every syllable ends with a vowel sound. Vowel pronunciations are as follows: a as in father, e as in day, o as in goat, i as in machine, u as in rule, and a nasally produced v as the vowel sound in tug. Each vowel can have either strong or weak stress and either long or short duration. Long vowels have about twice the duration of short vowels, as seen in short vowel of ama “salt” and the long vowel of aama “water.” There are also pitch differences in the pronunciation of vowels, with the last vowel of each word nasalized.
Cherokee has consonants similar to English j, s, t d, k, g, m, n, l, y, w, and h, but it differs from English in having no sounds resembling p and b. Cherokee has a glottal sound, which resembles a catch in the throat (as the middle sound in English uh-oh); a voiceless l (sounded like English l preceded by h); tl (like English l but with the tip of the tongue in position to make a t sound); ts (as in the end of the English word eats); ch (as in English church); kw (as in English queen); and gw (as in English Gwen).
Cherokee grammar is highly complex. Nouns are similar to those of English in that they represent a person, place, or thing, but Cherokee nouns are divided into two classes: animate and inanimate. In Cherokee, prefixes or suffixes added to nouns are equivalent to articles and adjectives in English. Although Cherokee pronouns do not specify he, she or it, nouns are gender specific, and there are content words for mother, father, boy, girl, man, woman, and similar equivalents in English.
Verbs are the most important part of every Cherokee sentence and are either active or stative. Active verbs refer to a action performed by someone, e.g., jiwoniha “I am talking.” Stative verbs refer to passive states or to actions performed on a recipient individual or group by someone other than the speaker. Each verb must have one or more prefixes followed by a root and at least one suffix. Additional prefixes and suffixes can alter the meanings further.
Verbs in Cherokee show great attention to details of the physical world and reflect a way of seeing and interpreting the world that is different from English. For example, the Cherokee way of expressing “to hand something to someone” depends on the nature of the object being handed: gvnea means “I hand you something nondescript” (probably solid); gvdea, “I hand you something long and inflexible”; gvnvnea, “I hand you something floppy or flexible” (such as a cloth); and gvnevsi, “I hand you something liquid.”
The Cherokee are working to preserve and revitalize their rich and fascinating language, and it is recognized and taught in the schools within Cherokee communities. However, since many Cherokee still do not speak the language at home or on a regular basis, its future in North Carolina is by no means secure.
References: Margaret Bender, Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah’s Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); William Harlen Gilberrt, The Eastern Cherokees (Washington: G.P.O., 1942); James Mooney, History, Myths, and Sacred Formulas of the Cherokee (Washington, DC: Bureau of American Ethnology, 1891); Sharlotte Neely, Snowbird Cherokees: People of Persistence (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991).
Colonial Survivals in Appalachian Speech
Ted R. Ledford, Lees-McRae College
Contrary to the popular view that it is Shakespearean in character, Appalachian folk speech is much closer to the language of colonial America. It has preserved a record of colonial speech unequaled in any other American region, largely due to Appalachia’s relative physical isolation during much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Differing agreement patterns between subject and verb (as in “We went to hunt for the horses which was lost”; “Snails is large and common”; and “Two files was demanded by the Indians”), which were once standard usage in the north of England and in the Scottish Lowlands, were also common in the writings of colonial America. Such constructions appeared in the speech of Appalachian natives well after their disappearance from mainstream American English. In present-day Appalachia there are still survivals from colonial pronunciation. A final r in such mountain terms as winder “window” and piller “pillow” have their counterparts in colonial writings (vaniller “vanilla”; holler “hollow”; musquetters “mosquitoes”), as does the intrusive r so frequent in Appalachian speech (corked “caulked”; orning “awning”). The Appalachian tendency for r to modify the pronunciation of the preceding vowel (tar “tire”; har “hair”; arish taters “Irish potatoes”) resembles phonetic spellings found in colonial writings.
Other language peculiar to mountain speech that appears in colonial-era writings include tushes “tusks,” pizen “poison,” and dost “dose.” Appalachian speech still has expressions like bubbies “female breasts,” and residents still hold a ladder to study “steady” it while another person climbs. Colonial writings by literate but not highly educated people contain these and a host of other expressions still used in Appalachia that the remainder of the country thinks are quaint. Seemingly Elizabethan English can occasionally be found in the mountains (Shakespeare wrote yers for “ears,” for example), but southern Appalachia has much more in common with the eighteenth-century language of the nation’s founding fathers.
References: Nicholas Biddle, ed., The Journals of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark (1814); Frederic G. Cassidy, Joan Hall et al., eds., Dictionary of American Regional English (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985–2012); harold F. Farwell Jr. and J. Karl Nicholas, eds., Smoky Mountain Voices: A Lexicon of Southern Appalachian Speech Based on the Research of Horace Kephart (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); Michael Montgomery and Joseph s. Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004).
Silke Van Ness, State University of New York at Albany
Nearly three centuries ago, German dialects were habitually spoken in the Appalachian regions of Pennsylvania, virginia, and North Carolina, and in the 1800s German dialects were commonly heard in Tennessee. While the emerging standard German (written German) was the language of newspapers, almanacs, educational materials, and religious sermons, German immigrants spoke a variety of German in their daily life regardless of religious affiliation. By contrast, the survival of the language in contemporary Appalachia is dependent on the survival of two conservative, separatist Anabaptist sects, the Old Order Amish and Old Order Mennonites.
William Penn’s promise of religious tolerance in the colony of Pennsylvania first enticed German-speaking Protestant groups that did not enjoy the protection or toleration of political authorities in Europe. Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Schwenckfelders, and Moravians started new lives in Pennsylvania. From the first settlement at Germantown, northwest of Philadelphia, in 1683, these colonists settled the counties of southeastern Pennsylvania (Lancaster, Lehigh, Berks, Northampton, Chester, York) and ultimately extended into more westerly counties (Mifflin, Somerset, Centre, etc.) Lutheran and Reformed Germans, motivated by escape from wars and poverty, soon followed earlier seekers of religious freedom. Within a few decades, these so-called non-sectarian Germans would vastly outnumber all other German church communities. By 1776, speakers of some form of German as their mother tongue made up one-third of the population of Pennsylvania, between 150,000 and 200,000 people.
German-speaking colonists originated primarily in the southwestern part of the German language area. The majority stemmed from the Palatinate, though there were significant numbers from Switzerland, Wurttemberg, Alsace, Westphalia, and Hesse. Lively interaction between speakers of varying background resulted in leveling their dialects towards a relatively hom*ogenous, new dialect of German made further distinct by borrowings (?? “screen door; fence”) and adaptations (as am tshumbe “jumping,” shpell “spell”) of lexical items from American English.
While Pennsylvania German is commonly referred to as Pennsylvania Dutch, this designation is misleading, having been produced by English speakers who misinterpreted the German dialectal form Deitsch “German.” By the end of the nineteenth century, 600,000 speakers of Pennsylvania German lived in the state, most of them nonsectarian German Americans. At that time, conservative Anabaptists, who were religious separatists, represented only a fraction of German speakers (e.g., there were only 3,700 Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania in 1890). But at the close of the twentieth century, the Pennsylvania German language was nearly extinct among nonsectarian speakers, while the population of Anabaptist sects continued to increase. The latter groups have kept the German dialect alive by rigidly separating their world into two domains: inside the group, Pennsylvania German is the sole means of oral expression; outside the group, English serves as the medium of communication, and all forms of writing take place in English. Even as Pennsylvania German approaches extinction among nonsectarians, the dialect continues to grow among Old Order Anabaptists, an estimated 26,000 of whom were speaking it regularly at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
A second large cluster of German dialect speakers was located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. The valley was settled almost exclusively by migration from southeastern and south-central Pennsylvania and from Maryland. The Adam Miller family, formerly of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, established the first permanent German settlement in 1726 near modern-day Elkton,Virginia. Many other families of various religious backgrounds followed. By the time of the American Revolution, German speakers from Pennsylvania inhabited large portions of Rockingham, Shenandoah, Frederick, Augusta, and Page Counties in northwestern Virginia, as well as and Hardy Counties in present-day West Virginia. At that time, they comprised more than 5 percent of the total population of Virginia, with most German colonists having settled in the Shenandoah Valley.
During the eighteenth century, the German language was used in both public and private domains, in newspapers, churches, and schools. Even a comprehensive collection of Virginia laws was translated into Standard German. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, English had replaced German in nearly all public functions. While the spoken language, a variant of the Pennsylvania German dialect, continued its vitality much longer, only a few very elderly individuals in Virginia belonging to Lutheran and Reformed churches were able to speak and understand it at the outset of the twenty-first century. Most lived in the Bergton-Criders area of Rockingham county or the Jerome-Orkney sections of Shenandoah county. A few others remained in the Propst Gap and Brushy Fork sections of Pendleton County, West Virginia.
In the 1940s, a small group of Pennsylvania German– speaking Old Order Amish settled in the Staunton–Stuart’s Draft area of Virginia. But in the last forty years of the twentieth century, most of their young people left their conservative roots and lifestyle along with the German dialect. Exact numbers of German speakers in the Shenandoah Valley are difficult to determine, but migration into the valley was numerically small, making these migrants highly susceptible to cultural and linguistic assimilation. As the language disappeared from Lutheran communities, however, a few Old Older Amish families who still learned Pennsylvania German as their first language moved into the mountain regions of Bland, Giles, Tazewell, and Washington Counties, assuring that German would continue to be spoken in southwestern Virginia.
Between 1848 and 1885, German was the main language spoken in Wartburg in Morgan County, Tennessee, but marriages to English-only speakers and the replacement of German by English in church services signaled the demise of the German language there. By 1970, only a few of the oldest residents in Wartburg and adjacent areas spoke any German dialect at all.
References: Christopher Dolmetsch, Deutsch als Muttersprache in den Vereinigten staaten (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1985); C. Nelson Hostetter, Anabaptist-Mennonites Nationwide USA (Morgantown, PA: Masthof,1997); Silke Van Ness, Changes in an Obsolescing Language: Pennsylvania German in West Virginia (Gunther Narr, 1990).
Hall, Joseph Sargent (1906–1992) Scholar.
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Joseph Sargent Hall was the first trained linguist to investigate Appalachian English in depth. From the 1930s to the 1970s he observed and recorded traditional speech in the Smoky Mountains of East Tennessee and western North Carolina. In his first area of study, phonetics, he produced the most detailed description of the pronunciation of any variety of American English, but as he came to know mountain people, his interests expanded rapidly. His collections were diverse, encompassing terminology of all kinds, hunting tales and other anecdotes, proverbs, folklore, instrumental and vocal music, and many other types of material.
When the federal government acquired the land that was to become the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, many older residents were allowed to remain on their property for the remainder of their lives. In 1937 Hall, who spent much of his academic career at Pasadena City College in California, was offered a summer job documenting the lives and lore of these mountain residents. Assisted by the Civilian Conservation Corps, he sought out and recorded mountain natives born as early as 1843 and documented the lives and speech of more than one hundred individuals in communities no longer on the map. Over half of his lifetime, he amassed a collection of material on mountain life unsurpassed in its richness, comprehensiveness, and detail.
Prior to Hall’s work, scholars were often interested only in confirming romantic notions about the archaic or supposed Elizabethan character of mountain English and had written about mountaineers en masse, generalizing about them and their speech. Hall approached his subjects without preconceptions and always identified the communities and the individuals from which his material came. Where he found local or generational differences in speech, he noted these. Not surprisingly, he discounted the view that mountain people spoke “Elizabethan English,” instead finding it much more varied and innovative than commonly thought. As the pioneer researcher of the speech and culture of the Great Smokies, Hall let people speak for themselves, setting a standard for scholarship in Appalachian English.
References: Joseph S. Hall, The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech (New York: Kings Crown, 1942); Michael Montgomery, “The Contributions of Joseph Sargent Hall to Appalachian Studies,” Journal of the Appalachian Studies Association 6: 89-98, 1994); Michael Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004).
Bruce L. Pearson, University of South Carolina
A number of Northern Iroquoian languages were present in northern Appalachia during the 1700s. Best known are the languages of the Iroquois Five Nations of New York State located originally in the Mohawk Valley and consisting of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca tribes—all perched on the northernmost fringe of Appalachia. Whether these languages were spoken beyond the MohawkValley prior to European contact is unknown. In the 1720s, remnants of the Tuscarora, an Iroquoian tribe from eastern North Carolina, joined the Iroquois Confederacy.
Of these tribes, the Seneca were present from time to time in what is now Pennsylvania and West Virginia. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a band calling themselves Mingoes and claiming Seneca descent still lived in West Virginia. The Susquehannocks, a Northern Iroquoian tribe separate from the original Five Nations, lived along the Susquehanna River in central Pennsylvania and thus would have the strongest claim to Appalachia, but they had disappeared by the mid-1700s as a result of European diseases such as smallpox and conflicts with other natives and American vigilante groups.
The Onondaga, Oneida, and one branch of the Seneca tribe have held onto portions of their ancestral lands in New York State, while the Mohawk and Cayuga tribes are now divided between the United States and Canada. One branch of the Oneida tribe is now located in Wisconsin, and branches of the Seneca and Cayuga tribes are located in oklahoma. Mohawk has the most contemporary speakers, as many as two thousand, but all tribes continue efforts to preserve interest in the language by publishing traditional narratives in bilingual editions.
The Wyandots, another Northern Iroquoian group that originated in Canada and had settled in Ohio by the late 1700s, moved into and out of Appalachia along with other displaced tribes. The grammatical structure of Wyandot is similar to the other Northern Iroquoian languages, which in turn are related to the Southern Iroquoian branch represented today only by Cherokee.
Wyandot, like the other Northern Iroquoian languages, is built around verb roots compounded in various ways. Prefixes specify location, direction, or repetition of an action, while suffixes indicate whether an action occurred a single time, has been completed, and the like. Additional prefixes identify the individual(s) involved in the action and, in the case of transitive verbs, both the subject and object. Thus the root -yo- can mean “come” or “go” depending on the prefix. With ta- “toward” and hi- “the two,” the form ta-hi-yo-’ means “the two came here.” With ha- “away” and in- “we two,” the form ha-in-yo-’ means “we two will go there.” The final apostrophe represents a glottal stop (the sound that occurs in the English expression uh-oh) and signifies a one-time event as opposed to a recurring event or a completed event. The personal prefixes in these examples specify two people, a category distinct from both singular (one) and plural (three or more).
Personal prefixes denoting both subject and object can be illustrated by the forms a-yom-ateduto-’ “I ask of you” and a’-sk-ateduto-’ “tell me,” in which the prefix yom- represents “I” as subject and “you” as object, while sk- represents “you” as subject and “me” as object. The final apostrophe in both examples denotes a one-time event. The a- prefix indicates something desired, while the a’- prefix suggests a demand.
The Wyandots were relocated to Kansas following the Indian Removal Act of 1830. One group, the Wyandot Nation of Kansas, remains in the Kansas City area, while the Wyandotte Nation of Oklahoma is based in northeastern Oklahoma. The language is known primarily from a compilation of forty narratives collected in 1911–12 by Canadian folklorist Marius Barbeau. The last speaker of Wyandot died in Oklahoma around 1950. In recent years the tribe has used the Barbeau collection and other materials in a continuing effort to learn more about the language of its ancestors.
References: Floyd G. Lounsbury, “Iroquoian Languages,” in Handbook of North American Indians, Vol. 15: Northeast, ed. Bruce G. Trigger (1978).
Kephart, Horace (1862–1931) Librarian, writer, and scholar
Karl Nicholas, Western Carolina University
Horace Kephart’s contribution to the understanding of Appalachian speech consists of two published works and a considerable body of notes. His magnum opus, Our Southern Highlanders, published by Outing in 1913 and augmented by Macmillan in 1922, contains a chapter devoted to “The Mountain Dialect,” and his article “A Word-List from the Mountains of North Carolina” appeared in Dialect Notes in 1917. Unpublished notes are housed in the Kephart Collection in the archives of the Hunter Library at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina. A lexicon of Appalachian speech based on these materials and prepared by Harold Farwell and Karl Nicholas was published by the University Press of Kentucky as Smoky Mountain Voices in 1993.
Kephart lived and wrote in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina during the first three decades of the twentieth century—a time when the distinctive dialect of the isolated mountaineers was still unsullied by mass communication or ease of travel. Trained as a librarian, Kephart compulsively recorded his daily observations of mountain life, first on note cards and then in notebooks. These notes were at first a restorative exercise for him, as he had come to the mountains in 1904 after suffering a nervous breakdown—very likely the result of his arduous duties as head librarian at the St. Louis Mercantile Library, the position he had held since 1890. Eventually his observations turned into a new occupation, for he never returned to library work, supporting himself instead by writing, chiefly articles for outdoor magazines dealing with camping, hunting, and woodlore.
Kephart lived first in Dillsboro and then in Hazel Creek, North Carolina, until 1907. He left these locales briefly to travel throughout the southern Appalachians, comparing the lives and folkways of the mountaineers he encountered with those he had become familiar with in the Smokies. Returning to North Carolina in 1910, he took up residence in Bryson City, where he remained until his death in an auto accident in 1931. The last years of his life were spent actively lobbying for the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Kephart’s painstaking scholarship—as evidenced by his copious notes, extensive reading, and determination to check and compare his observations firsthand—sets him apart from the local color writers of the time. To be sure, he read the local colorists, but his observations—particularly those dealing with mountain dialect—consistently exhibit a depth of analysis far beyond those of his contemporaries. His chapter in Our Southern Highlanders is the first serious treatment of Appalachian speech beyond a few desultory word lists. His fascination with relic forms (betwixt
“between”; fernent “near to”) helped to promote the erroneous notion that mountain speech was largely Elizabethan, but his equal attention to such matters as learned terms in mountain speech (discern “see”; recollect “remember”) and linguistic innovations (antigadlin and slantdicular “out of plumb”; hickey “unknown object”) clearly mark him as an uncommon and influential observer. Kephart’s detailed and dispassionate observations relied on recorded fact, not fancy or impressions, making his contribution to the study of Appalachian English a lasting one.
References: Harold F. Farwell Jr. and J. Karl Nicholas, eds., Smoky Mountain Voices: A Lexicon of Southern Appalachian Speech Based on the Research of Horace Kephart (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993); Horace Kephart, Our Southern Highlanders (New York: Macmillan, 1913; revised 1922).
Anita Puckett, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Scholars often view gender as a social category comparable to ethnicity and socioeconomic class1 rather than a biological description. In this context, traits of gender emerge from social interactions, with language playing a critical role. There has been little research in the area of language and gender relations in southern Appalachia, but existing studies suggest three areas in which language plays a significant role—requests, literacy, and verbal lore.
As elsewhere, men and women in Appalachia differ subtly but significantly in the way they make requests of others. The genders construct the grammar and rhetoric of requests according to the status of the persons making and receiving a request and the nature of the item or service requested.
Requests are usually phrased as a want or need. Want-requests are more self-focused and political, frequently asserting authority, power, or privilege. Need requests connote a social purpose in which compliance benefits a number of people. When someone says, “I want a truck,” he or she is expressing a different intent and purpose than when he or she says, “I need a truck.” Men tend to use want-requests more than women; young children use poorly formed want-requests extensively. Requests in much of the region are indirect rather than direct. Residents of close-knit communities assume they know each other well enough to provide wants and needs without being asked. The use of order-requesting imperative forms (as in “Move your truck!”) is highly restricted. They tend to occur when the right to make a want-request is clear or when a need-request is within the rights of the person demanding (for example, when a husband says to his wife, “Fix me my supper”). Otherwise, indirect verbal structures are used to make requests and may take the form of a narrative that parallels something the requestee can do or provide; a woman, for instance, may describe to another woman the way her mother cooked something in hopes the listener will cook the dish the same way. At other times a third party may make a need known to someone capable of meeting it. Direct requests using ask, beg, or other requesting verbs usually require the requestor to be in a close relationship with the requestee. The requestor then has the “right” to ask and is considered in her or his “place.” Direct requests also occur when speakers have developed strong claims on each other and tend to take place among kin.
With few exceptions, research indicates that items or services women have the “right” to request fall into the following domains: the bearing of, caring for, and rearing of children; domestic spaces and activities; food preparation and related activities; healing and caring for the sick; literacy activities; and spiritual or moral matters involving church activities or the evaluation of people’s behavior. Women answer and make most telephone calls. Men tend to have authority and control over matters related to money, machinery, politics, land transactions, and outdoor activities. Many patterns in request usage are changing as more women find jobs outside the home in which they work together with men.
In many southern Appalachian communities, gender also plays a role in literacy activity. Traditionally, men have tended to avoid reading and writing activities beyond those related to practical use, such as instructions. Women are more apt to read novels, write invitations or letters, send cards, or make extensive use of e-mail, among other reading and writing activities. Although the rise in information technology jobs has encouraged men to use computer keyboards, many still strongly resist writing extended prose. Women may be much more likely to do so.
These culturally influenced variations in literacy contribute to a gender-based division of labor (for example, men repair computers or use them for finding information while women key in data). These patterns can negatively impact men’s access to high-paying professional positions that require extensive reading or writing, but women also have limited access to jobs that require authority over others, especially men, despite their greater mastery of literacy. Many women will not take such a job, or do not keep it, if the position requires that they violate their “place” with respect to both men and women.
Studies suggest gender differences in verbal lore traditions as well. Women tend to learn singing and storytelling traditions from their mothers, grandmothers, or aunts; men acquire traditions from fathers, grandfathers, or uncles. Women often tell their tales only to their children or close family members and typically feature women resisting the patriarchal dominance that characterizes the region. Appalachian storytellers such as North Carolinians Angelyn deBord and Bessie Eldreth and Kentuckian Octavia Sexton replace or usurp dominant male heroes or trickster figures with strong female leads. For example, one of Sexton’s female characters uses male strategies to get back at her lazy husband, while Eldreth asserts women’s self-worth by telling of women who perform kind and valuable services to others. In contrast, renowned storytellers Ray and Orville Hicks presented tales in which the central male character exercises straightforward guile, wit, or authority over others in ways that reinforce male dominance. Genderization of storytelling therefore suggests that many women use this form of oral literature to covertly contest or resist patriarchal norms.
References: Bill Ellis, “The Gentry-Long Tradition and Roots of Revivalism: Maud Gentry Long,” in Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers, ed. William Bernard McCarthy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Elizabeth C. Fine, “‘Lazy Jack’: Coding and Contextualizing Resistance in Appalachian Women’s Narratives,” National Women’s Studies Association Journal Special Issue: Appalachia and the South: Place, Gender, Pedagogy 11:112-37 (1999); Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Anita Puckett, “’Let the Girls Do the Spelling and Dan Will Do the Shooting’: Literacy, the Division of Labor, and Identity in a Rural Appalachian Community.” Anthropological Quarterly 65: 137-147. Katherine Kelleher Sohn, Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
Anita Puckett, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The term language ideology refers to implicit or explicit judgments or evaluations concerning speech and the cultural context in which it occurs. As ways of linking the linguistic forms of a given speech event to social forms themselves, specific language ideologies have enormous power to shape and even determine how various populations assess those using various non-standard American English “ways of talking.” Most evaluations of Appalachian speech fall into one of three linguistic ideologies, each of which can overlap with one another according to how a person interprets a given set of communicative events. First is prescriptivist, asserting that Appalachian speech deviates significantly from an American English standard. The second is romantic, arguing that Appalachian speech is a survival of Elizabethan English or some other antiquated form of speech. The last is relativistic, maintaining that Appalachian speech is equal to other forms of English in its linguistic functions.
Broad public acceptance of an ideology often leads to its being treated as true, whether or not linguistic evidence supports it. A widely accepted language ideology can dictate political, economic, social, educational, and cultural policies and actions based upon linguistic usages and practices and beliefs about them, including Appalachian ones. This process leads to implicit rankings of superiority or inferiority by which schools, businesses, media, and governmental agencies judge individuals according to their socio-cultural use of language.
With compulsory public education common by the late nineteenth century, most Appalachian children first encountered Standard Written American English. Teachers were trained to judge speech as correct or incorrect using models of proper English grammar and usage based on social class. Their prescriptivist ideology assumed Standard English was immutable, correct, pure, inherently logical, and maintained by elevated written texts, as well as being the intrinsic property of privileged and educated people. Language, captured in dictionaries defining acceptable American English words and in prescriptive grammars, possessed a moral component, distinguishing good speech from bad speech and good speakers from bad speakers. Good Americans, it was presumed, would speak the prescribed Standard American English.
Like most Americans, however, speakers of Appalachian varieties exhibit numerous vocabulary and grammatical usages labeled deviations by prescriptivists. Words such as ain’t, poke “paper bag,” mater “tomato”; verb constructions such as might could, hit don’t matter, I’m a-comin’, and I done fixed it; and sound variations such as kittle “kettle” all became examples of these so-called deviations. As a result, Appalachian speech was devalued in public schools, newspapers, and popular media as corrupt, inferior, ungrammatical, pathological, and sometimes even as an incoherent string of words rather than an actual language.
The first written expression of this ideology occurs in Will Wallace Harney’s “A Strange Land and a Peculiar people,” published in 1873. The ideology is often expressed in media through satiric, mocking, or comic depictions that associate nonstandard dialogue with undesirable character traits and negative stereotypes. Examples are readily found in comic strips (Li’l Abner and Barney Google and Snuffy Smith) or comic books and in film (Deliverance); in moralizing newspaper columns on “correct” workplace speech; and in the coinage of derisive labels such as Hillbonics in the wake of the 1996 Ebonics controversy sparked by the Oakland, California, school district’s decision to treat African American Vernacular English as a variety significantly different from Standard American English and requiring special approaches to education for many African American students.
An evaluation of southern Appalachian speech as Elizabethan or Shakespearean arose in the late-nineteenth century as a counter to the prescriptivist stance. Writers of local color fiction, as well as regional educators and folklorists, published popular works and gave speeches advocating a romantic, pre-industrial view of Appalachia and Appalachian speech. Berea College President William Goodell Frost strongly presented this alternative ideology in his 1899 article “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the Southern Mountains.”
Romantic ideology evaluates southern Appalachian speech as a “survival” from the era of Shakespeare. The argument relied on a limited number of striking variations from Standard American English speech that are found in works using language from the time of Chaucer or Queen Elizabeth I—word forms and meanings such as pack “carry”; plural constructions such as nestes “nests”; and past tenses such as holp “helped.” Along with elements of folklore, such as log cabins, spinning wheels, and a cappella ballads, adherents used these language similarities to argue for Appalachians as racially and culturally pure Anglo-Saxon survivors from an earlier time. Schools and theatrical groups fostered this ideology in the region through readings or productions of Shakespearean plays. The romantic ideology of Appalachian speech has been discredited for several reasons: its highly selective use of language forms as support, the diversity of origins for speech usages within the region, the overlap of many features with other dialects, and the historical fact that Appalachia was not settled exclusively by Anglo-Saxons. Most pronunciation and lexical variations noted as Elizabethan can be attributed to eighteenth-century southern England. Many other variations (especially grammatical ones) from Standard American English can be attributed to eighteenth-century northern England, Scotland, or Ulster.
In an attempt to undermine the ideology of prescriptivism, sociolinguists propagated the term Appalachian English in the 1970s, identifying the nonstandard speech of Appalachian residents as a distinct variety of English. They argued for the integrity of local speech as a fully developed language system that fulfills the same functions as any other variety. In this view, it is neither superior nor inferior to Standard Written American English, merely different in certain lexical items and in a few features of grammar and punctuation that can be codified in rules like any language. Similar to the prescriptivist ideology, this relativistic ideology asserts a moralist stance. In this case, it is a democratic evaluation of speech that rejects presumptions of language superiority. Nonetheless, it, too, has its detractors. This ideology is politically idealistic in its goal of linguistic equality; it is authoritarian in that it is constructed by academics rather than by the speakers who use the variety; and it defines Appalachian English (or its more contemporary “Englishes”) by political borders such as those decided upon by the Appalachian Regional Commission, rather than by speech or communication communities.
No language ideology is without a political component, no matter how well-intentioned its proponents. Prescriptivist, romantic, and relativistic ideologies of Appalachian speech have had enormous political, economic, and social impact on how Appalachian residents are perceived by those outside the region and by themselves.
References: Amy D. Clark, “Voices in the Appalachian Classroom” in Talking Appalachian, ed. Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward, 110-24 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); Edward Finegan, Attitudes toward English Usage: The History of a War of Words (New York: Teachers College Press, 1980); Nancy M. Hayward, “Think Locally: Language as Community Practice” in ” in Talking Appalachian, ed. Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward, 70-80 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2013); Michael Montgomery, “In the Appalachians they Speak Like Shakespeare,” in Language Myths, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill, 66-76 (New York: Penguin, 1998); Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, & Paul V. Kroskrity, eds., Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: 1976).
Harold Farwell, Western Carolina University
Logging has been a major industry throughout Appalachia since the mid-nineteenth century and, as in most specialized activities, has developed its own jargon. In spite of technological changes, much early logging terminology continues in use. Derogatory terms for loggers—such as woodhicks and woodpeckers—are no longer used, nor is ridgerunner applied to a farmer who logs part time. But old terms such as cant hook, which refers to a long pole topped with a hook for turning logs, are still used for loggers’ tools. Some loggers’ slang lingers in other contexts. Ball-hootin’, a term that once referred to the dangerous practice of rolling cut timber downhill, has come to be used by teenagers to describe speeding around in cars on mountain roads: “He was ballhootin’ down 107.”
As an industry, logging moved southward through Appalachia, with some of the biggest operations in the Great Smoky Mountains coming directly from Pennsylvania after timber supplies were exhausted there. Technical terms migrated along with the workers and as a result became fairly standard throughout the region. The Climax engine, a steam locomotive common on logging spurs in the South, was developed in Corry, Pennsylvania. A Maine blacksmith, Joe Peavey, improved on the cant hook by adding a spike on the end, and the “peavey” can still be used to “muscle” logs. Not surprisingly, many loggers from the southern Appalachians left for the Pacific Northwest after their timber was cut, taking their language with them. The slang term boar’s nest for a lumber camp or almost any messy bachelor’s residence is now more common in the West.
Regional differences have probably been less important than the passage of time in varying the language of logging. The three major epochs of lumbering are defined by the mode of transporting logs from forest to mill: streams and rivers in the nineteenth century; railroads in the early twentieth; and trucking in the late twentieth century into the twenty-first. The earliest phase was notable for the use of “splash dams” along upper streams; these were log dams that created temporary pools to which newly felled logs were “skidded,” or dragged. When these dams were broken, the impounded logs would “splash” downstream to a holding pond near the mills. Where rivers could be used, the timber was “boomed,” or bound, into “cribs” and floated downstream by “drivers.” The use of steam engines brought steam-powered skidders: both “ground hogs” that dragged the timber on cables over the ground and later “overhead skidders” on a network of suspended cables that “flew” the timber over the forest to “scalers,” who graded the timber in “loading areas” on spur railroads. “Hayburners,” or horses, their “teamsters,” and oxen driven by “bullwhackers” all became outmoded, as did “crosspoling” logs across trails to make them sturdy and “swamping,” or cutting, new trails to “snake” logs out of the forest.
In both of the early phases, roughly until the 1930s, logging camps were the way stations between forest and mill. Linked only to distant mills by streams or narrow gauge rails, the isolated camps were home to about seventy-five loggers in a totally male society. The lore and language of these camps has not yet been fully recorded, but they were perhaps not as rough as circ*mstances might suggest. Swearing was forbidden in many southern Appalachian camps, and records indicate that camp language was richly metaphoric. The boss, called a “bull,” had to be tough, a “bull-roarer,” or driver of men. During the workday, separate crews for each stage of the logging process fanned out in the forest, jokingly called “the sticks,” where trees might be eight feet across. Most crews had a “push,” or foreman. “Swampers” built roads maintained by “chickadees” and “grease monkeys,” who kept them slick. Sawyers with their crosscut saws, called “misery whips” or “briars,” formed crews with “buckers,” who sawed timber in lengths. Bark crews had “spudders” and “rawhiders,” who removed and stacked bark from felled trees.
In camp a “filer” kept all the saws sharpened while the “commissary clerk” ran the company store. He and the “time boss,” who kept track of working hours, had to be able to add and subtract, apparently not universal skills. Men were paid in “scrip” or “doogaloo” and dropped “tokens,” small company coins, into a pail before each meal. A “gut bell” announced the meals, which the cook, called a “gut robber,” had prepared with the help of “cookees.” Provisions were “bait,” beans “firecrackers,” and biscuits “cat heads.” Adjoining the mess hall was a “lobby” where the men could socialize, ruled over by the “lobbyhog,” usually a tough old lumberman who played both housekeeper and peacemaker.
This way of life and much of its special language has disappeared, but logging terms turn up in surprising places. As early as the 1940s, Riverview Amusem*nt Park in Chicago boasted a flume water ride called, in good logger style, Shoot the Chute, the “chute” being an especially narrow rapids. Modern kayakers and whitewater rafters still speak of the “pitch,” or height, of the river and identify as “rips” those sections of a stream not quite swift enough to be labeled rapids or narrow enough to be chutes.
References: Frederic G. Cassidy, Joan Hall et al., eds., Dictionary of American Regional English (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985–2012); Roy B. Clarkson, Tumult on the mountains: Lumbering in West Virginia, 1770-1920 (Parsons, WV: McClain, 1964); Harold F. Farwell Jr. and J. Karl Nicholas, eds., Smoky Mountain Voices: A Lexicon of Southern Appalachian Speech based on the Research of Horace Kephart (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1993).
Medical and Health Terminology
Anthony Cavender, East Tennessee State University
Effective communication between health-care providers and patients is often a critical dynamic of the healing process. Providers must be able to explain disease etiology and treatment, and patients must be able to articulate symptoms. In times past, the use of regional terminology sometimes complicated health professionals’ efforts to understand their patients’ needs.
Health-care providers in contemporary Appalachia may still encounter antiquated medical terminology such as phthisic or tizzy “asthma,” grippe “flu,” dyspepsia “indigestion,” consumption “tuberculosis,” piles “hemorrhoids,” St. Vitus' Dance “chorea,” flux “diarrhea,” and dropsy “heart disease.” The term smothering refers to labored breathing, and an episode of labored breathing is a drawing spell. Swimmy headed means “dizzy.” One who is peaked (pronounced pee-kid) or puny feels ill; one who is pert feels energetic. The term leader refers to a ligament or tendon, particularly in the neck or ankle. The verb creel means “to sprain,” as in “He stepped off the porch and creeled his ankle.” Variant forms of beal refer to an infected sore (“My ear is bealed”) or a boil (“I’ve got a bealin’ on the back of my neck”). Other terms include risin' “a boil or carbuncle,” corruption “pus produced by an infected lesion,” and kernel “a swollen lymph node in an armpit, on the neck, or in the groin.” The term stove can mean “to jam or stub a finger or toe” (as in “I stoved my finger when I caught the ball”) or “to be bedridden by illness or exhaustion” (as in “She’s been stoved up for a week now with the flu”). The term pieded is used to describe variegated skin color, as in “My legs are pieded and they hurt something awful.” The term fallen off (or falling off) refers to loss of weight (“This past month I’ve fallen off a lot”). One who is slightly overweight is fleshy, but stout if excessively fat (or strong and robust). Chafed areas of skin, especially in the groin, are described as a galled or gallded. The expression loss of courage is used to describe impotency or diminished sexual drive in men.
In some situations, health-care providers and Appalachian patients may mistakenly think they are talking about the same thing. The term bold hives, for example, might be interpreted by a physician as urticaria, a skin disease caused by an allergic reaction to certain foods, drugs, and other agents. For some Appalachians, however, it refers to an infant-specific folk illness. It was believed that all babies came into the world with a mysterious entity inside them referred to as the bold hives (or bull hives). If allowed to remain in the body, this entity would adversely affect the heart and lungs and sometimes result in death. It was customary in many Appalachian homes to “hive” the baby or infant, usually with a hot tea commonly made with ground ivy or catnip. Some Appalachian patients interpret a diagnosis of high blood pressure as high blood, a folk illness caused by an abnormally high volume of blood in the body.
Similarly, physician use of the term blood thinner to describe anticoagulant drugs is construed by some Appalachians to mean that they have thick blood, a folk illness caused by abnormally viscous blood. The term nerves (as in “I’ve got a bad case of the nerves”) is a label for a debilitating mental disorder. White liver refers to a condition of someone having an abnormally strong or insatiable sexual drive. Vance Randolph observed that in the Ozarks “When a lively, buxom, good-looking woman loses several husbands to death, it is often said that her inordinate passion has ‘killed ’em off,’ and she is referred to as a white-livered widder.” In Southern Appalachia both men and women can have the white liver. Those that had it didn't seem to be hurt by it and kept on living, but their need for sex hurt or killed others.
The terms identified above, with the notable exceptions of high blood, thick blood, and nerves, are used almost entirely by the older generation, making it likely that many such terms will disappear with the passage of time.
REFERENCES: Frederic G. Cassidy, Joan Hall et al., eds., Dictionary of American Regional English (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985–2012); Anthony Cavender et al., eds., A Folk Medical Lexicon of South Central Appalachia (Johnson City, TN: East Tennessee State University, 1990); ; Anthony Cavender, Folk Medicine in Southern Appalachia (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Vance Randolph, Ozark Magic and Folklore (New York: Dover, 1964).
Anita Puckett, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The word Melungeon (and its variant spellings) refers to individuals or families who are usually presumed to have mixed-race ancestries and whose ancestors generally settled in out-of-the-way areas of eastern and southeastern Tennessee, far southwest Virginia, northwestern North Carolina, and southeastern Kentucky. The dominant scholarly view is that their ancestries are combinations of Native American, African, and northern European, although a few scholars now include a southern European or Mediterranean component. The assertion of a Turkish connection has been dismissed by the Melungeon Heritage Association. Popular and folkloric accounts of Melungeon physical features often refer to combinations of white and non-white characteristics such as straight black hair and blue eyes. These presumed features often do not conform to members’ actual physiques or to photographs of their ancestors and kin. Strong evidence exists that Melungeon has been used as an outsider’s term and was highly derogatory from its beginning. Many descendants of Melungeons still living in areas where the term has been common refuse to use the word, at least as one referring to themselves.
The etymology of Melungeon is disputed, and more than fifty origins have been cited in published sources. Most of these lack any historical or linguistic support. Current historical research supports the commonly asserted French origin of mélange “mixture.” A French origin is supported by the late-eighteenth-century presence of French Huguenots and other French speakers in the region where Melungeon emerged as a commonly used term. The first documented record of Melungeon is found in the minutes of the Stony Creek Primitive Baptist Church, Scott County, Virginia, in 1813. Various twentieth-century accounts report that Portegee or Portuguese was used by members to designate themselves. These terms are not linked necessarily to modern-day citizens of Portugal, as they could also have been ethnic identifiers that simply circumvented stigmatized terms for African or African American ancestry. Also, many self-described Portegee have not defined the word as meaning they had ancestors who came from Portugal or as having any meaning other than a term that referred to themselves.
Melungeon had largely fallen into disuse by the mid-twentieth century, in part because of diffusion of Melungeon community members into white populations through marriage and through other strategies that enabled them to be treated as white. The term occurred primarily in an occasional published literary or scholarly work or in restricted speaking contexts such as expressions or discussions of the genealogies of deceased residents. The outdoor drama Walk toward the Sunset of the 1960s rejuvenated the term Melungeon, however. From the 1990s the Melungeon identity movement and the Melungeon Heritage Association arising from it have given Melungeon an international recognition and are redefining it as a positive, respected word referring to mixed-heritage people who have suffered an oppressive and discriminatory past. Consequently, the current meaning of Melungeon is fluid, reflecting its changing usage by the different groups using it.
Reference: C. S. Everett, “Melungeon History and Myth,” Appalachian Journal (Summer 1999).
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
The production and distribution of homemade whiskey (most often called simply “liquor” in the mountains) have a lively history in Appalachia, beginning with the earliest settlement of Europeans in the region. The Whiskey rebellion of western Pennsylvania first brought Appalachian distilling to national attention in the early 1790s. More than two centuries later, revenuers, or “the revenue,” continue to hunt for moonshiners, or “shiners,” who manufacture the beverage illegally and for bootleggers and runners who market it, though the days of high-speed, midnight chases down “thunder road” and transactions at a “blind tiger,” where a customer leaves or hands money to an unseen proprietor, are now in the past.
Within the extensive technical and descriptive terminology associated with distilling, the old-world roots of the process can be detected. These lie in Scotland and Ireland, where the beverage was usually made from barley and oats. Introduced by the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, Scottish terms still used in Appalachia include flake stand “a container with cold, flowing water in which a still’s condenser is set,” low wine “the low-proof liquor produced by the first distillation on a simple pot still,” and run “a distillation cycle producing whiskey.” From Ireland come terms formerly applied to poteen, such as double “to strengthen by distilling a second time” and doublings “whiskey produced by distilling it a second time” or “the second run of whiskey through a still.”
Most terminology for the process as well as the equipment for distilling is not only American in origin, but also super-regional in distribution, carried south and west into much of the country by people as they migrated. Within Appalachia one finds little variation in terms for technological components. Two notable exceptions are coil, condenser, or worm for the long, spiral-shaped, copper tube attached to the cap of a still and submerged in cold water and thump keg, thump chest, thumper, thumping chest, or thump tank for the second distillation unit sometimes added to a whiskey still.
Terms for the beverage itself are much more numerous. These can emphasize its varying qualities, effect on the body, or appearance. They run the descriptive gamut from the derogatory (busthead and rotgut) to the sardonic (scorpion juice, wobble water, panther sweat, headache medicine, and white mule—the last because of its “kick”) to the blissful (glory juice and O be joyful). Some of these are local, others regional or national. Splo (a shortening of explode) is an East Tennessee term, popskull a southern Appalachian one. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, other terms that are Appalachian in distribution include beer “the fermented mash solution produced during the first stage of distilling,” groundhog still “a still that is a metal cylinder with a wooded top and bottom placed in a hole dug into the side of a hill, usually on the bank of a creek,” and pot tails “the mash left in the still after distillation.” Though illegal distilling is increasingly mechanized, many traditional terms continue to be employed.
References: Joseph E. Dabney, Mountain Spirits: A Chronicle of Corn Whiskey from King James’ Ulster Plantation to American’s Appalachians and the Moonshine Life (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1974); David W. Maurer, “The Argot of the moonshiner,” American Speech (February 1949); David W. Maurer, and Quinn Pearl, Kentucky Moonshine (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1974); Daniel S. Pierce, Corn in a Jar (Gatlinburg: Great Smoky Mountains Association); Charles D. Thompson, Spirits of Just Men: Mountaineers, Liquor Bosses, and Lawmen in the Moonshine Capital of the World (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).
Michael Adams, Indiana University
Appalachia cuts a great swath across Pennsylvania, and central and western Pennsylvania speech is historically significant to the entire Appalachian region as the point of origin for many of its speech characteristics. By the time settlers from Maryland and Virginia had established themselves in the Pittsburgh area by 1763, a wave of Scotch-Irish migration had been swelling westward from the ports of the Delaware Valley into Appalachia for a generation. These emigrants from Ulster left an indelible mark on language in Appalachian Pennsylvania and areas farther south and west in Appalachia in which they settled.
Appalachian Pennsylvania speech exhibits features of Ulster Scots, certain English dialects, and local eastern and central Pennsylvania dialects influenced by Pennsylvania German. These streams of language came together in the Pittsburgh region. Though part of the much larger Midland dialect region, Appalachian Pennsylvania speech has retained and developed words, sounds, and grammatical features distinct from the rest of Pennsylvania, as well as from Ohio, New York, and the rest of Appalachia.
The influence of Ulster Scots is most evident in Appalachian Pennsylvania’s vocabulary. In the early twentieth century, western Pennsylvanians could poke fun at a gillie ‘easily led person, fool’ (from Scots gillygawkie) off gallivanting ‘wandering idly’ (probably borrowed from New York and New England speech) for believing he had seen a fetch ‘spirit that foretells early death’ (a popular Irish term) or the Deil ‘Devil’ himself alongside the road at midnight; or perhaps as he fled from a Jenny-in-the-wood ‘will o’ the wisp’ (from Scots Jenny ‘generic young woman’ and with closely parallel Scots forms such as Jenny-bun-tail and Jenny-burnt-tail). Other ancient Scots words once adopted by western Pennsylvanians, such as usquebaugh ‘whiskey’ and brickle ‘brittle,’ have faded from use. No one speaks any longer of being livergrown ‘having enlargement or adhesion of the liver,’ and wounds rarely beal ‘fester, suppurate’ (from boil) for western Pennsylvanians as often as they do for their southern Appalachian cousins.
But a farmer in Appalachian Pennsylvania still fills a bucket rather than a pail in order to redd or redd up ‘clean’ (in Scots usage from the sixteenth century) a baachie ‘filthy’ (probably from Scots bach ‘cow dung’) barn until the dirt is all ‘all gone’ (borrowed from eastern and central Pennsylvania German neighbors). After work, he or she may stop at a store for a piece ‘snack’ and carry it home in a poke ‘paper bag’ (both probably from Scots). Western Pennsylvanians still occasionally attend a belling ‘noisy celebration of nuptials,’ and they still put carbon oil ‘kerosene’ (from a nineteenth-century trademark owned by a Pittsburgh oil company) in the lamps they carry to frighten the newlyweds. Comfortably wrapped in haps ‘quilts’ (a Scotch-Irish term) on cool October mornings, they may still have conniptions ‘fits of anger’ (borrowed from New York) at the noise that grinnies ‘chipmunks’ make in the spouting ‘eaves’ (of Ulster origin) outside their windows. Sometimes, neighbors are nebby ‘nosy’ with each other (from Scots neb ‘beak’ through Ulster Scots) — they stick their nebs into other people’s business. The speech of the Ulster Scots also contributed to the means by which Appalachian Pennsylvania speakers formed words. For instance, the diminutive suffix -ie so prevalent in Appalachian Pennsylvania vocabulary, as in grinnie, croppie ‘girl with bobbed hair,’ blackie ‘small iron cooking pot,’ and sprucie ‘frizzled fowl,’ reflects a centuries-old formative habit of lowland and Ulster Scots.
One way to gauge the Appalachianness of Pennsylvania vocabulary is to contrast it with vocabulary from the middle and eastern parts of the commonwealth. Western Pennsylvanians watch grinnies scurry in the undergrowth, but those in the center of the state call them ground hackies, and north easterners prefer the term ground chippie — there are no grinnies in Wilkes-Barre or Scranton. In the southeast of the commonwealth, dragonflies have traditionally been called snake guarders (a loan translation from Pennsylvania German schlangehieter) or snake servants, in the western part of the commonwealth snake doctors or snake feeders, terms common throughout the American south, so very likely the result of a northwards movement rather than movement across the commonwealth towards the west and out into the Midwest. One should note, however, that dragonfly is gradually overtaking the historical snake-based alternatives.
Similarly, while pie-lovers across Pennsylvania, including the Appalachian southwest, delight in shoofly pie ‘molasses pie, dry bottomed or wet bottomed,’ only southeasterners eat funeral pie ‘raisin pie, frequently served at funerals’ or Montgomery pie ‘shoofly-like pie with a cake topping,’ named for Montgomery County, in Pennsylvania’s southeast corner. What folks up north call a walleye, Pennsylvanians historically call a Susquehanna salmon — the term is identified early in the commonwealth’s game laws. Scrapple ‘meat scraps molded into a loaf, then fried’ now extends into many states, but it started in the southeast and migrated west and then south further into Appalachia first. Sugar water ‘maple sap,’ however, is of western Pennsylvania origin and is, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, chiefly southern Appalachian, though evidence shows its entry into the Midwest, as well. Western Pennsylvanian words can share in a Pennsylvaniaism that stays in Pennsylvania; they can be stages in the migration of Pennsylvania words across the commonwealth and south into Appalachia; or they can be the sources of Appalachian words.
This reminds us that language variation occurs at various scales. Some linguistic features extend from Pittsburgh throughout southern Appalachia. They’re part of what we call Appalachian dialect. Others are quite local. In southeastern Pennsylvania, so strongly influenced by Pennsylvania German, Shrove Tuesday is called Fastnacht, and the doughnuts people eat to celebrate the holiday are called fastnachts. In Berks County, people also celebrate with what they call babycakes, sugar cookies cut into a human shape, like a gingerbread man, but without any spices. Fastnacht is a sub-regional term, but babycake is local. In the same region, kids play corner ball (a loan translation of German eckball), and so do kids in other German-settled areas in Ohio and Kentucky, but not in western Pennsylvania. There, specifically in the southwest, kids Sam McCordens one another, when they steal their marbles — Sam McCordens is a legendary marble stealer, and Sam McCordens a marble word restricted to the locality in which the legend resonates.
One lexical feature known throughout Pennsylvania and beyond, too, is interchangeable leave/let. In Berks County, if someone brings you babycakes on Fastnacht, you can say, “Thanks, just let them on the table,” when standard American English expects leave. In a German-influenced area like Berks County, it’s reasonable to assume that leave and let are interchangeable because German lassen covers both English meanings. But leave for let and let for leave is attested from Middle English to current English, especially in Scots and Ulster Scots. Thus, interchangeability of leave/let in western Pennsylvania is more likely of Scotch-Irish than German origin; in the east, it’s more likely of German origin; in the middle, two people standing next to each other might not distinguish between leave and let for different reasons, representing different lexical and cultural histories.
German has strongly influenced grammatical words in Pennsylvania, however. In the southeast only, prepositional toward can mean ‘compared to’ (a loan translation of German geeich) — “I’m not good at corner ball toward him,” for example. In central Pennsylvania, one encounters yet (a loan translation of German doch) as an intensive or interrogative particle — “I’m fishing for some Susquehanna salmon yet” — as one does in other German-influenced areas of the United States. The preposition to can mean ‘with’ (a loan translation of German zu) — “I want some honey to my oatmeal” — from the southeast across the center of the commonwealth, onto the eastern edge of western Pennsylvania. But till to mean ‘by the time that’ (a loan translation of German bis) — “The Montgomery pie will be ready till they get here” — extends from Montgomery County in the southeast to the Alleghenies, that is, into western Pennsylvania and south as far as North Carolina.
Certain sounds are characteristic of Appalachian Pennsylvania speech. Western Pennsylvanians typically replace the suffix -ing with -in’ (sittin’ rather than sitting), retaining the final nasal sound typical of English and Scots speech in the eighteenth century, when central and western Pennsylvania were first settled, which has since spread throughout American speech. They were the first to merge the vowel sounds of cot and caught, so that the two words are indistinguishable except in context, a tendency that did not spread into southern and western Appalachia, as one might expect, but through Ohio into the American Midland. African American speakers generally do not exhibit the cot/caught merger, but the merger has been characteristic of Pittsburgh speech for so long that African Americans — who make up 26 percent of the city’s population — and whites all participate in it. Pittsburgh speakers also produce the low back vowel in father in place of various diphthongs. Famously in Pittsburgh, one does not go downtown but dahntahn, and words like mouth, towel, and tile have the same vowel, such that the last two, like cot and caught, can be distinguished only in context. Appalachian Pennsylvanians also exhibit an aggressive r-fulness, so that words like car and near end in a recognizable r. This feature, surely planted in the region by Scotch-Irish settlers, distinguishes Appalachian Pennsylvania from New England, where r sometimes simply disappears (some Bostonians pahk the cah and Downeasters in Maine pronounce near in two syllables, as nee-uh), and from the South, including southern Appalachia, where r is voiced farther back in the mouth, almost as an afterthought.
Appalachian speech, including that in Pennsylvania, sometimes operates by rules markedly different from those that govern either Standard American English or contiguous dialects. Historically, speakers in the region have preferred various nonstandard forms for verbs in the past tense, as in “When I heared he eat all them pies at the fair, I run home as fast as I could, but when I told her, Mama just sit there, shakin’ her head.” They have employed multiple modals, as in “I might could do it,” another habit adopted from Ulster Scots. Concord between subject and verb has been flexible, allowing “The trees was all blown down” as well as the standard “The trees were all blown down.” Forms like these are now much less frequent in Appalachian Pennsylvania than they once were; however, multiple modals are still integral to dialects in other parts of the country.
Pittsburghese, the name by which Pittsburghers know their own dialect, includes terms used by Appalachian Pennsylvanians generally, and some that are purely local. A Pittsburgher packs jumbo ‘bologna sausage’ for lunch, then, like others in Appalachia generally, carries it to work in a poke, secured at the top by a gum band ‘rubber band.’ If her homeward road is slippy ‘slippery’ and it is going for ‘approaching’ seven o’clock, the rest of her family may wait ‘delay’ dinner until she arrives. Much of what characterizes Appalachian grammar has persisted from very old forms: yourn ‘yours,’ a form parallel to mine, was a feature of dialects of southern England when Appalachian Pennsylvania was settled; you’uns and yinz ‘you (plural)’ (parallel to southern American y’all) traveled to the area in the mouths of Scotch-Irish immigrants and persists in Pittsburghese to this day, so much so that white Pittsburghers — yinz is not used in the African American community, in which southern y’all is preferred — often refer to themselves as Yinzers.
Pittsburghese has become a bit of an industry. Outsiders are so taken with the dialect that Yinzers have decided to capitalize on this interest. Visitors often purchase a copy of Sam McCool’s New Pittsburghese: How to Speak Like a Pittsburgher (2008), which, of course outsiders never will. Others hunt out the Yinzer Bible (2012), supposedly the essential guide to the city’s language and culture. They can walk around their hometowns with t-shirts that say, “I’m surrounded by jagoffs” and “YNZ Pittsburgh,” as though YNZ abbreviated a summer destination like MV (Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts) or PI (Pawley’s Island, South Carolina). You can even reimagine the Gospels as though Jesus were from Western Pennsylvania in The Original Pittsburgh Bible: The King James Translation of the New Testament with Pitsburghese and Over 2,000 Yinzes (2013).
Enregisterment is what linguists call the process described for Pittsburgh here: outsiders claim that a group speaks a dialect — we say downtown, they say dahntahn, and even weirder, they say yinz instead of you guys; the in-group agrees that the dialect identifies them and their culture — outsiders notice yinz, so let’s call ourselves Yinzers; both the outsiders and the insiders talk about the dialect and the identity it encodes; at some advanced point in all of this talk about talk, the insiders may choose to commodify dialect features in some way — in folk dictionaries, for instance, or on t-shirts — such that some of those features — like yinz in YNZ — become icons of the speech, place, and culture.
Pittsburghese is local language and it’s restricted by the degree of enregisterment — at least some of its features can’t plausibly be spoken elsewhere. Appalachian Pennsylvania, however, has contributed to what we might call General American English. Forms that entered American speech through Appalachian Pennsylvania, such as supposeta ‘supposed to’ and anymore ‘nowadays,’ as in “Anymore, people stream video instead of going to the movies,” have spread across the Midwest and further. “The car needs washed,” as opposed to “The car needs to be washed,” a grammatical structure probably borrowed from Ulster Scots, makes as much sense in Des Moines, Iowa, as it does in Pittsburgh and the surrounding area. Appalachian Pennsylvania dialects are robust and independent 250 years or so after the area was first settled by English, Ulster Scots, and Pennsylvania German adventurers. The region is perhaps most important historically as the port of entry for many regional and national features of American English.
References: Michael Adams, “A Berks County, Pennsylvania, Culinary Term,” American Speech 69 (1994); Michael Adams, “Lexical Doppelgangers,” Journal of English Linguistics 28:2000; Frederic G. Cassidy et al., eds., Dictionary of American Regional English (1985–2012); Barbara Johnstone, Speaking Pittsburghese: The Story of a Dialect (2013); Barbara Johnstone, Daniel Baumgardt, Maeve Eberhardt, and Scott Kiesling, Pittsburgh Speech and Pittsburghese (2015); Hans Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949); Michael B. Montgomery, “Exploring the roots of Appalachian English,” English World-Wide 10:227-78, 1989; Claudio R. Salvucci, A Dictionary of Pennsylvaniaisms (1997); Henry W. Shoemaker, Thirteen Hundred Old Time Words (1930); Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
As in much of the English-speaking world, names of persons in Appalachia consist of a first name (also called a given name, Christian name, or forename), a surname (or family name), and often a middle name. First-name patterns resemble those in other regions of the United States. Names derive from the Bible (Joshua, Elizabeth), classical languages (Patrick, Katherine), and other sources. Until well into the nineteenth century, as elsewhere in the United States and in the British Isles, first-born and sometimes second-born children were frequently named after grandparents, with subsequent children named after older relatives. This practice stresses family continuity, but it can complicate the work of genealogists in reconstructing family trees because of the repetition of first names across generations. More recently, other practices have come into vogue, such as giving children (especially girls) faddish names or assigning all children of a generation names having the same initial letter.
Nicknames are useful in differentiating people having the same legal name. For example, three men named John Sutton, who all lived in the same small, western North carolina community, were known locally as Big John, Little John, and Lyin’ John based on physical and personality traits. Nicknames are bestowed more commonly on men, and men are more often known by their middle names. A father and son having the same first name may have the nicknames “Big” and “Little” prefixed, regardless of their relative size or age. Both children and adults are called by double names (Sara Jane, Joey Lee) in Appalachia more than in most other parts of the country as another means of distinguishing people with the same first and last names. Children are sometimes referred to by a parent’s first name, as in “Pete’s Liza is marryin’ Ella’s Jack.”
Common European surnames date back only to the later Middle Ages, when European rulers and their bureaucracies began documenting and taxing their subjects. Their origins fall into four principal groups based on the father’s last name (as Adamson, MacAndrew, Williams), occupation (Carpenter, Weaver, Smith), location (Woods, Lancaster), or physical traits such as eye color (Brown) or body shape or size (Short). Since they are passed from one generation to another, surnames have been used to estimate the proportions of European settlement groups in Appalachia. Historians posit that English, Germans, and Scotch-Irish were the three predominant European groups to settle the region, with subregional variations. For example, the English were more numerous in eastern Kentucky, the Germans in the northern Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and the Scotch-Irish in southwestern Pennsylvania. Approximately half the surnames found in Appalachia historically are based on English, followed by German and Scottish (each with about 10 percent), Irish, Welsh, and French. These estimates are based on form, and many names are widespread in England or Scotland.
Due to several factors, determining ethnicity from surnames is inexact, however. Many presumably English names, such as Robinson and Andrews, were found throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. Others are indeterminate in origin. Finally, many surnames have been obscured intentionally or unintentionally. For example, while Myers and Shultz are self-evidently German, many others were Anglicized through spelling (Snyder, from Schneider, meaning “tailor”) or translation (Smith from Schmidt; Carpenter from Zimmerman). Even then, surnames indicate only one of a person’s ancestors and thus reveal little for certain about his or her cultural background.
References: John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (1921); William E. Mockler, “Surnames of Trans-Allegheny Virginia, 1750-1800,” Names: Journal of the American Name Society 4: 1-17 (1956).
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Humans assign names to land features, whether natural or man-made, to give order, meaning, and familiarity to their environment. As elsewhere, place names in Appalachia may be literal (Big Stone Gap, Virginia; Bluefield, West Virginia), metaphorical (Hell for Certain, Kentucky), or even promotional (Saltville, Virginia; Jellico, Tennessee, the latter after the angelica root). Place names, especially those given by Europeans and their descendants, often commemorate prominent leaders (Boone County, West Virginia; Washington, Pennsylvania); founding families (Hillsville, Kentucky); English towns (Romney, West Virginia; Rugby, Tennessee); Biblical sites (Berea, Kentucky); older American communities farther east (New Salem, West Virginia, after Salem, New Jersey, itself named after the city in Israel); or significant events (Fighting Creek, Tennessee).
Most Appalachian place names are comprised of a specific element (as a personal name or a descriptive word) and a generic one (a common noun for a watercourse, mountain, town, or other feature on the landscape). Generic names sometimes vary by subregion. Community names ending in -burg or -burgh (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) are more common in northern Appalachia; those ending in -ville are more common in southern Appalachia (Asheville, North Carolina). Rivers are designated as such everywhere (though in southern Appalachia smaller ones are occasionally called prongs or forks), but streams are only sometimes creeks in the southern half of Appalachia or cricks in the northern half). A stream is often called a branch in the southern half of Appalachia but a run, as in parts of Britain, in the northern half or sometimes a lick in Eastern Kentucky or southern West Virginia. Other generics found mainly in Appalachia include bald “a naturally bare or treeless area on a mountain or ridge summit”; butt “a steep slope that stands out at the end of a mountain or ridge”; hollow or holler “a small sheltered valley or open place between ridges”; lead “a long ridge extending from a main ridge of a peak”; and cove “an enclosed valley having a level floor, cultivatable land, and a single drainage outlet.” Diamond, a generic name for a town square, is found in Pennsylvania but originated in Ireland.
Europeans also borrowed many indigenous names, especially those for rivers and other watercourses(the Kanawha in West Virginia; the Allegheny in Pennsylvania). They applied others to their settlements (Chattanooga, Tennessee; Cullowhee, North Carolina) or political units (Otsego County, New York), or they combined them with generic names (Toccoa Falls, Georgia). The name for the entire region (Appalachia) probably derives from the Apalachee, a tribe much farther to the south. Four of the region’s thirteen states have names transferred from native names of rivers (Ohio from Iroquoian, Alabama from Choctaw, Tennessee from Cherokee, and Mississippi from an unknown source, but clearly a native one). Kentucky is possibly from Shawnee, but its exact source has eluded scholars. Of the remaining states, six are named for British royalty (Georgia after George II, North and South Carolina after Charles I, Virginia and West Virginia after Elizabeth I, and Maryland after Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I), one an English city (New York), and one an English landowner (Pennsylvania).
Many native names were adopted by the French or Spanish before entering English usage, and thus may no longer resemble closely the pronunciation of the original. Tennessee, for example, which first appeared in English as Tinnase in 1707, was recorded by the Spanish as early as 1567 as Tanasqui and derives from an ancient Cherokee town of the same name. Native names in northern Appalachia usually came from Iroquoian languages (Tioga County, New York) or from Delaware (Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania), those in southern Appalachia from Cherokee (Tellico, Tennessee; Etowah, Georgia). Other names were translated into English, so their native source is now disguised.
Place names derived from European languages other than English are not common in Appalachia. Those that occur usually represent or incorporate the name of an immigrant family such as Lesage, West Virginia (French), and Floyd County, Kentucky (Welsh). Some derive from place names in the Old World, like Wartburg, Tennessee (named after an area of Germany by German-Swiss settlers in Morgan County, Tennessee), Berea (from Greek), or Salem (from Hebrew). The origins of many place names (such as Kentucky) are unclear because they were used years before appearing on any map and will remain controversial. As a result, popular stories, or “folk etymologies,” often arise to explain their unusual spelling or character. In recent decades the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, the U.S. Geological Survey, and other governmental agencies have attempted to standardize names, but many variants persist. For example, government maps of Sevier County, Tennessee, show Wear Valley, which is locally known alternately as Wear Cove, Wear’s Cove, or Wear’s Valley by locals. Despite efforts to document them, countless place names, perhaps even the majority of them, are informal ones used locally for roads, hills, and other parts of the landscape.
References: Hamill Kenny, West Virginia Place Names: Their Origin and Meaning (Piedmont, WV: Name Press, 1945); William S. Powell and Michael Hill, North Carolina Gazetteer: A Dictionary of North Carolina Places (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Robert M. Rennick, Kentucky Place Names (Lexington: University Press, 1984).
Bruce L. Pearson, University of South Carolina
The Shawnee people, native to southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky, and western Pennsylvania, were the only indigenous representative of the Algonquian linguistic group in northern Appalachia at the time of European contact. They were pushed west of the Mississippi River by the 1795 Treaty of Greenville after Tec*mseh was defeated in his effort to halt American expansion. Displaced along with the Shawnee were tribes such as the Delaware, who originally had lived in coastal areas of Pennsylvania and New Jersey before early Europeans pushed them into the mountains and valleys of northern Appalachia.
Shawnee and Delaware are related languages, both belonging to the Algonquian family centered around the Great Lakes and including Fox, Miami, Menominee, Potawatomi, Ojibwa (Chippewa), Cree, Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and numerous languages of New England. As in other Algonquian languages, Shawnee sentences are built around a verb. The verb includes a root, which denotes the core meaning and which may be compounded to modify or elaborate the basic meaning. Prefixes and suffixes denote the subject and object of the verb, making separate pronouns unnecessary. A single verb often constitutes a complete sentence.
Interesting features of Shawnee grammatical structure can be illustrated by -neew-, the common verb root meaning “to see.” (Hyphens before and after a form indicate that it cannot occur by itself.) Nineewa, meaning “I see him/her,” consists of three elements: ni-neew-aa. The prefix denotes first person (“I”) and the suffix (shortened to -a in final position) denotes verbal action normally flowing from the person marked in the prefix to the person marked in the suffix. In this case the absence of an overt suffix implies third person, which could be either “him” or “her” since gender is not specified in Shawnee.
The form for “he (or she) sees me” is ninookwa, which actually comes from an underlying form ni-neew-ek-w-aa. In Algonquian languages, first person, if present, always occurs as a prefix and third person as a suffix. The suffix -ek denotes a reversal of the action, which now flows from the third person suffix -w to the prefix, representing first person as object rather than subject. The suffix -aa again denotes verbal action and is shortened in final position as usual. The lip rounding associated with w causes the surrounding vowels to be pronounced as o.
The Shawnee people today live in three separate communities in central and eastern Oklahoma and southwestern Missouri. A fourth group claiming Shawnee ancestry still lives in Ohio. As many as two hundred members of the largest community near Oklahoma City continue to speak the language, and it is used by tribal elders on ceremonial occasions. Although a number of scholars outside the tribe have studied the language over the years, the Shawnee community itself has not developed a written tradition and few tribal members under the age of fifty have grown up speaking the language, making its future uncertain.
Reference: Bruce L. Pearson, “Shawnee as a Southeastern Language,” Southern Journal of Linguistics (Fall 2000).
Ellen Johnson, Berry College
Spanish speakers in the United States have typically been clustered in the Southwest or in large urban areas such as Los Angeles, New York, Miami, or Chicago. Appalachia is one of the new, atypical destinations for Spanish speaking immigrants. With the exception of coal-mining areas such as southern West Virginia, which attracted African Americans, Italians, and others, industries in rural Appalachia have not needed to bring in many workers from outside the region in the past. However, since the 1990s, companies have increasingly relied upon workers migrating from south of the U.S. border, leading to the unprecedented use of a language other than English in Appalachia. This trend is most apparent in areas with strong economic growth, such as northern Georgia and western North Carolina. According to the census data, there were at least 464,441 Spanish-speakers in Appalachia in 2000, which equates to approximately 2 percent of the Appalachian population, although this figure is widely considered to be an undercount. The population of Spanish-speakers is not uniformly distributed, however, with a concentration of more than 7 percent in Appalachian Georgia.
Before the 1990s, Spanish speakers in the region were mostly a transient population of young men who came temporarily to work. In the twenty-first century, growing numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants began bringing their families and buying homes. They are drawn to Appalachia not only by jobs, but by the same factors that draw retirees to the mountains and keep long-term residents there: the sense of community and security found in small towns and the desire to escape from the urban problems of pollution, traffic, and noise. The trend toward more stable Hispanic communities in Appalachia has made it more likely that the Spanish language will become permanently established.
Immigrants from Spanish-language countries learn English as quickly as immigrants from other places and in all eras, but they may be less likely to stop speaking Spanish. Many adult immigrants do not become fluent in English due to long hours of work and limited contact with English speakers. Their school-aged children, however, do learn and speak English regularly, while remaining bilingual. By the third generation, most of these families have become monolingual English speakers. Spanish speakers tend to retain their bilingualism longer than other immigrant populations due to a constant arrival of new monolingual Spanish speakers into communities.
Spanish speakers in Appalachia come from many different countries. The exact composition varies from place to place because of the way new immigrants are recruited, which is most often through an informal network of family and friends extending back to the country of origin. The largest group by far is from Mexico, followed by those from other Latin American countries. Many arrive in Appalachia after first living in other parts of the United States. Immigrants, who see themselves as Mexicans, Guatemalans, or of other ancestry, often consider group labels such as Hispanic and Latino disagreeable.
As is common in areas of high immigration, new dialects of both Spanish and English have begun to emerge in Appalachia as newcomers become more integrated into the community and opportunities for interaction become more frequent.
References: Arthur D. Murphy, Colleen Blanchard, and Jennifer A. Hill, eds., Latino Workers in the Contemporary South (2001); Barbara Ellen Smith, The New Latino South: An Introduction (2001).
Specialized Language of Coal Mining
Stephen D. Mooney, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
The rich lexicon of coal mining in Appalachia includes thousands of items, as might be expected from an industry once employing more than half a million workers in parts of seven states, from Pennsylvania and Ohio to Tennessee and Alabama, with the bulk of modern-era mining taking place in Central Appalachia (Kentucky, West Virginia and, to a lesser degree in Virginia).
An underground mine accesses coal seams from below the earth’s surface, while a surface or strip mine exposes them from above. An underground mine is designed for either room and pillar or longwall extraction. In the former miners generally work in pairs or small teams in rooms separated by pillars of coal left to support the mountain. In hand-loading days, miners bored vertically into coal seams (the face) manually with picks or later with machines called continuous miners having rotating drill bits to chew out and spit back the coal onto loading arms. When miners reach the end of a seam or it becomes too thin for extraction, they back out of the sections, pulling pillars as they go. That is, they remove the blocks of coal supporting the mountain, in effect pulling it down on their heads. In longwall mining, interlocked longwall machines may remove a span as long as 5,000 feet by using huge blades that cut back and forth horizontally, shearing the coal from the face.
Underground mines may be shaft, slope, or drift in type. In a shaft mine, workers ride an elevator vertically into the earth to access coal seams. In a slope mine they once walked but now generally ride a man-trip down an entryway of varying angles. In a drift mine, the most common type in Appalachia, they walk or ride into an entryway that slopes gently upward, providing natural drainage for the high volume of water released (in Appalachia, aquifers generally form atop non-porous coal seams, many of which also lie below river level.)
Surface mines may also be of several types. In a pit or area mine, workers use explosives and bulldozers to remove the overburden (trees, other plant life, and the top soil) from a coal seam lying more or less level with the earth’s surface. Such a mine is rare in Appalachia because of the steep topography of the Cumberland-Allegheny Plateau, in which all of the region’s coal lies. In contour (also known as bench or highwall) mining, workers follow the contour or direction of a seam along a mountainside, cutting straight down to remove the overburden and to expose the seam. This process creates a vertical highwall and then a level bench below it on which machinery can maneuver. In an auger mine, the exposed coal is extracted not by explosives, but by huge drills or augers that bore into the seam. In mountaintop removal mining (what the industry calls peak-reduction mining), explosives remove the tops of mountains, exposing coal seams below, and the overburden is pushed into an adjacent hollow, creating a valley fill. A truck mine delivers mined coal to a transportation link by truck instead of loading it directly onto a rail link at the worksite.
The vocabulary of the miner has always been extensive and constantly evolving and often makes use of analogies to nature or to animals. A horse's back, for example, is the curved indentation left in a mine ceiling after a slab of rock or coal falls. Bird's eye cannel is a type of bituminous or soft coal (versus anthracite or hard coal) that is extremely high in BTU content and imprinted with dime-sized concretions said to resemble a bird's eye. (Cannel coal, from candle coal, is so named because long shards of it would burn much like a candle.) Bug dust is the airborne coal particles lingering after coal is shot from the face. A dog hole is a small mine, often non-union (and thus sometimes called a scab mine) with a reputation for unsafe conditions. Possum piss refers to the lubricant used underground to keep machines and parts from rusting or to the hydraulic fluid surface miners pour into their bulldozers and front-end loaders.
In the hand-loading days before automation, the miner’s large, colorful lexicon reflected his mastery of many skills and tasks. Upon entering his working room for the day, he propped the roof (or top) with timbers and then laid track right up to the face of the coal seam. After lying on his side and undercutting the seam (which had to be further supported with short timbers, or sprags), he drilled a series of blasting holes with a breast auger and used a tamping rod to pack his black powder or dynamite. Then he inserted a thin, hollow metal tube into which he threaded the necessary length of fuse, further packed the blasting hole with a clay dummy or two to ensure proper control of the explosion, lit the fuse, and yelled “fire in the hole!” or perhaps “shootin’ coal!” to warn of the impending blast. If the coal had been blasted from the face without undercutting, it was shot from the solid. After the dust settled, the miner loaded the loosened coal into a gon, hung his weigh tag on its nail, and then pushed the gon into the entryway for delivery to the outside, where the checkweighman credited it to him. Then he cleaned his work area of waste rock (gob or bone), to be hauled out to the slag pile, and headed home for the day.
Every two weeks or month the miner collected his pay, often in the form of company money (scrip or clacker) negotiable only at the company store or commissary (or robbissary or pluck me store in the vernacular of mining families, because of inflated prices). Often the miner collected nothing at payday because he had been advanced scrip credit for groceries for his family or for mining supplies to do his work, so he labored not for a wage but to pay off mounting debt to the company. On such instances the weary miner would walk home, lay his paycheck before his hopeful wife, and mutter “snake again” because of the squiggly line drawn by company officials through the column tabulating his earnings. The next week he would do it all over again.
References: Douglas Crickmer and David Zegeer, eds., Elements of Practical Coal Mining (Society for Mining Metallurgy, 1981); Jack M. Jones, Early Coal Mining in Pocahontas, Virginia (1969); George Korson, Coal Dust on the Fiddle: Songs and Stories of the Bituminous Industry (1943); Dennis R. Preston, Bituminous Coal Mining Vocabulary of the Eastern United States (1973).
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Appalachia is well known for the dexterity of its storytellers and its distinctive vocabulary. However, the region’s speakers may be most noteworthy for their use of intermediate verbal forms—sayings, phrases, and short verses and rhymes that encapsulate experience, comment on daily life, and exhibit word play. These include proverbs and aphorisms, similes, riddles, tongue twisters, play verses (counting-out and other children’s rhymes), figures of speech, and other types of concise verbal folklore. Most such forms are more or less invariable, making them easily memorized and handed down orally from generation to generation. Many are several hundred years old, but new ones are being created all the time.
Strictly speaking, proverbs are sentences that express general truths or popular beliefs based on shared experience and attitudes. Many proverbs used in parts of Appalachia are quite old and derive from classical or Biblical sources or are traceable to medieval or Renaissance England. Used to instruct or impart an ethical perspective, they are most often expressed in present tense statements (A stitch in time saves nine; A whistlin’ woman and a crowin’ hen always come to some bad end) but not always: Root, hog, or die and When you can’t afford it, don’t butter both sides of your bread are imperatives. Frequently proverbs make use of literary devices such as alliteration, meter (most often a four-beat line), rhyme, a balanced or parallel construction expressing an opposition, and ellipsis; Waste not, want not has all of these features. Personification and metaphor are seen in The apple never falls far from the tree. Proverbs are used to deal with a variety of recurrent social situations, including providing a short, pithy, moral comment on an event, emphasizing that a situation is familiar and has been successfully dealt with before, giving advice, summing up an argument, or reinforcing a point.
Proverbial exaggerations (usually in the pattern so + adjective + that) express the extraordinary degree to which something is true or that something or someone possesses or embodies a quality, as does It was so good you could taste the girl’s feet in it that hoed the corn it was made out of, a statement referring to moonshine.
Similes are also a part of everyday discourse in Appalachia, but lack the element of folk wisdom. They are proverbial phrases that take one of three general patterns (as + adjective + noun; adjective + -er + than + noun; or verb + like + noun). Used most often to emphasize rather than to compare, similes add color and expressiveness to speech, by juxtaposing two things, qualities, or actions that are not usually associated with one another. Thus, his wife was as ugly as a mud fence daubed with chinquapins means that she was very ugly; Joe is meaner than a striped snake that he is very mean; and She wanted to play as bad as a crippled pup that she wanted to play very badly. As thick as fiddlers in hell means “plentiful.” Likewise, She went down that row like a hen a-peckin’ and He just took off like a scalded dog both mean that a person went very quickly.
Riddles are verbal puzzles used to tease, test, or entertain, as in sessions in which members of a group take turns trying to outwit one another or compete for telling the “bestone.” Often containing puns, they consist of a stated or implied question (usually prefaced by an invitation to “see if you can guess this one”), a short period to contemplate an answer, a guess at the answer; then the answer with an explanation.
Question: What went to grandpa’s house on Sunday, stayed a week, and came back on the same Sunday?
Answer: A man who rode a horse named Sunday.
As an aid to memorization, riddles may take the form of a short verse, most often several rhyming lines. Examples include the following:
Hit’s as round as a ring,
and as deep as the spring,
and all the King’s horses
couldn’t pull it up.
Answer: A well.
As I went around my willy-go-whackum,
there I spied old Bow Backum,
and I went home after Tom Tackum,
to run Bow Backum,
out of my willy-go-whackum.
Answer: Going around the cornfield, I saw the old sow and went home to get the dog.
Children’s verses also include rhymes for many types of play. A counting-out rhyme found in Appalachia is the following:
As I went up the crazy steeple;
there I met three crazy people;
one was black, one was blue;
one was the color of my old shoe;
what color is that?
(The child who is pointed at supplies the name of a color, and the counting out continues.)
The expressiveness of mountain speech and the resourcefulness of its speakers are also found in metaphorical language that is often mildly earthy but that captures human shortcomings. To build the fence after planting the corn means “to marry after a child is conceived,” while to drive one’s ducks to a poor market and to fly over a field and settle on a cowpile mean “to make a poor choice in marriage.” Mountain phraseology can be striking visually (can see to can’t see means “from dawn to dusk”; bloom for the grave means “to get gray hair, grow old”), aurally (call the hogs means “to snore loudly”), or psychologically (charge it to the dust and let the rain settle it means “to dismiss a loan considered small, unimportant, or impossible to collect”).
References: Paul G. Brewster et al., eds., The Frank C. Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore, Vol.1: Games and Rhymes (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1952); Wolfgang Mieder et al., eds., A Dictionary of American Proverbs (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); James Still, Still, James, Rusties and Riddle & Gee-Haw Whimmy-Eiddles (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1989).
Beverly Olson Flanigan, Ohio University
The dialect of the Ohio River Valley has been studied for only sixty years, but observations about its distinctive features were made even in the earliest period of settlement. Travelers to the Ohio Valley, which extends from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River joins the Mississippi, wrote about the words, pronunciations, and grammatical forms used in this area, contrasting them with New England, Virginia, and Philadelphia speech. In an 1878 issue of Appletons’ Journal, Reverend N. C. Burt commented on the “Scotch-Irish” origins of the English of Pennsylvania, the Cumberland Valley of Virginia, and the trans-Allegheny region, noting the use of phrases such as I want out, to wait on (someone), to take sick, and quarter till (in telling time). Similarly, Burt observed that the “broad a” of New England gave way to a “narrower a” in words like laugh, grass, and past, and that the final r was pronounced in this middle region but dropped in both New England and the South. Referring to Ohio specifically, Burt traced three distinct regions, representing migration from New England in the northern area, Pennsylvania in the central area, and Virginia and Kentucky in the southern belt. These observations have been confirmed by recent studies, beginning with the American Linguistic Atlas Project in the 1930s and continuing with the Dictionary of American Regional English project in the 1960s and more focused studies since.
The Ohio Valley is part of what most linguists now call the South Midland dialect area; its dialect shares some features with both southern Appalachian speech and general southern American English. The three largest cities in the valley—Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, and Louisville, Kentucky—differ largely because of the influx of people from different rural areas as well as from other regions of the country. Stable residence patterns in the areas surrounding these cities have, on the other hand, led to the retention of older forms of speech in a belt running north of the river through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois (roughly south of the old Zane’s Trace and the National Road) and throughout all of West Virginia and Kentucky south of the river. Crosscutting this South Midland region is the trans-Appalachian area of secondary settlement from western Pennsylvania and northern West virginia to the upper Ohio Valley and from the Blue Ridge through the Cumberland Gap into southern Ohio.
Vocabulary items common in the Ohio Valley include gutter, skillet, blinds, spigot, snap beans, snake feeder, polecat, toboggan, redd up, and Beggars’ Night (corresponding to the northern terms eaves trough, green pepper, pail, bag, firefly, crayfish, frying pan, shades, faucet or tap, green beans, dragonfly, skunk, ski cap, clean up, and Trick-or-Treat); some of these, however, now alternate frequently with northern or urban forms. The use of mamaw and papaw for grandparents is still common, even in young people’s speech. Grammatical forms include the plural you-all (not y’all) and you’ns (in the Pittsburgh area, y’uns or y’ins), possessive you-all’s, and reduced phrases want off, want out, over top of, and upside, as well as needs washed (as opposed to needs to be washed or needs washing). Vernacular past tense forms are common, as in “he come,” “I done it,” and “I done seen him.” The subject relative pronoun may be absent, as in “He’s the man stole my car”; and a personal dative pronoun is sometimes added, as in “I’m gonna get me a new car soon.” Singular nouns of measurement are used with plural meaning: ten mile, five bushel, six foot; and an a- efix before a progressive verb is still used by older and rural people: He was a-dancin’; They come a-runnin’.
Pronunciation features include the rhyming of collar (and sometimes color) with caller, cot with caught, and Don with dawn. Three other mergers of vowels advancing throughout Appalachia and now present in southern Ohio result in the rhyming of steel with still, pool with pull, and sale with sell. Also common is the tensing of vowels in fish, push, and special, (feesh, poosh, spacial); pronouncing greasy as greazy; adding r in wa(r)sh, l in draw(l)ing, and t to across(t); and using monophthongs in I, buy, fire, and tired (to rhyme with ah, bah, far, and tarred) and diphthongs in dog and tall (pronounced as dawg and towel). Stress on the first syllable, as in IN-surance and UM-brella, is common, and the reduction of two syllables to one also occurs, as in sewer, Stewart, and Newark (pronounced sore, stort, nerk).
While not all Ohio Valley residents use all of these vernacular forms, many use some of them, especially in rural and small-town areas. Older people tend to use them more than younger people, and men are more likely than women to use vernacular grammar in particular. While education and out-migration are promoting the adoption of non-local vocabulary and grammar, pronunciation is more resistant to change. Furthermore, these forms may spread as residents reassert their Appalachian identity and as General Southern american speech, the source of many Appalachian features, continues to influence Midland English. Out-migration from the valley has already carried regional forms throughout ohio to Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus, and Akron. The features described above should therefore be regarded not as relic forms in decline but rather as evidence that at least some traditional features of Appalachian English are still alive and well in the Ohio Valley.
References: N. C. Burt, “The Dialects of Our Country,” Appleton's Journal, n.s. 5:411-17 (1878); Robert F. Dakin, The Dialect Vocabulary of the Ohio River Valley, 3 vols. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan dissertation, 1966); Clyde T. Hankey, “Notes on West Penn–Ohio Phonology,” in Studies in Linguistics in Honor of Raven I. McDavid, Jr., ed. Lawrence M. Davis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1972); Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: 1976).
Loyal Jones, Berea, Kentucky
While Appalachians are widely perceived as religiously inclined and conservative in personal habits, the region’s speech, in given circ*mstances, manifests its own brand of vulgarity, profanity, invective, and innuendo. A good example of colorful, regionally distinct swearing was once provided by Cratis Williams, widely regarded as a founding father of Appalachian Studies, quoting his grandfather’s spontaneous reaction to a balky piece of farm machinery: “I wish, by God, that this son-of-a-bitching thang was in the fur fork of hell with its back broke.” In polite company, Appalachians who become sufficiently provoked to use strong language are apt to utter innocuous euphemisms (sometimes called “by-words”) such as golly, dad burn it, gad, or even eye gollies rather than unvarnished oaths in the style of Williams’s grandfather. But in circ*mstances where off-color language can be employed without offense, rural Appalachian speech is often scatological, profane, and laced with sexual innuendo.
Though focused not on Appalachia but the Ozark mountains, the best-known scholarly work on bawdy language in rural highlands is folklorist Vance Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales. This ground-breaking work raised eyebrows when the University of illinois Press published it in 1976, but the sexual jokes contained in it, collected over a period of many years, are often hard to distinguish from those of the Appalachians. In the introduction to the volume, folklorist Rayna Green observes that the previous unavailability of realistic, common, and obscene material of the type collected by Randolph had contributed to a wide perception of a rural people as “quaint, archaic, courtly rustics removed from the realities of life in a contemporary world.
As elsewhere in rural America, the most common Appalachian invective uses various anatomical parts and scatological terms to express disapproval of character, to question veracity, or to ridicule. A person of dubious intelligence may be said to be unable “to grab his ass with both hands” or “too dumb to pour piss out of a boot.” Notable terms of wide utility, though crude, can carry subtle nuances. Horse-sh*t, bullsh*t, and chicken sh*t are not used interchangeably, for instance. While the first and second are often used as interjections, the second is also widely used to indicate loose talk or an untruth. Chicken sh*t often connotes a subject or individual beneath contempt though it, like other such terms, can be modified or embellished, as in “chicken sh*t sonofabitch.” Many such words can serve equally well as nouns, verbs, adjectives, or interjections when used with expertise.
Just as off-color language is used to ridicule, dismiss, or express contempt, so it is employed in exaggeration and in expressions of humor, with sexual language having particular affinity for the latter. Again, nature provides the most common metaphors and similes. A summer downpour brings rain “like a cow pissing on a flat rock,” for example. Sexual speech, being especially sensitive, is heavily metaphorical and also often drawn from behavior associated with various animals. A man known for sexual prowess is referred to as a “tomcat,” a “stud hoss,” or a “billy goat.” By the same token, a woman thought to be available is “ready as a rabbit.” Women who follow musicians to festivals have been called “weed monkeys.” In general, off-color language is taboo in mixed groups, especially when children are present. In segregated circ*mstances, though, both men and women use pungent language, which helps to account for children’s learning such speech.
Notwithstanding the wider use of profanity and sexual innuendo by entertainers and unrestrained language on the Internet, many Appalachians, particularly in small towns and rural settings, continue to be appalled by any off-color speech, be it vulgar, profane, or even intemperate.
References: Vance Randolph, Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folktales (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1976); Richard A. Spears, Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, hom*osexual Lingo, and Related Matters (Middle Village, NY: David, 1981); Cratis D. Williams, Southern Mountain Speech, ed. Loyal Jones and Jim Wayne Miller (Berea, KY: Berea College Press, 1992).
Williams, Cratis D. (1911–1985) Scholar and folklorist.
Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina
Cratis Dearl Williams was the foremost native interpreter of the speech of Appalachia. In lectures, performances, and essays (especially a series of eleven articles in Mountain Life and Work in the 1960s), he brought an understanding of many aspects of the region’s English untouched by other scholars before or since. These included such expressive and rhetorical devices as hyperbole, similes, metaphors, oaths, proverbs, and the pitch, rhythm, melody, and pace of speech. In his monumental doctoral dissertation, “The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction” (1961), he dealt extensively with how literary artists had portrayed mountain English over the previous century. In this and other writings he did more to present the individual speaker and to counter stereotypes about mountain speech than any other individual.
Not a formally trained linguist, Williams trained himself through informal study and observation and relied on intuition and memory for his originality and insight. A native of northeastern Kentucky and a life-long educator, first in public schools and later on the university level, Williams traced his awareness of language to being humiliated for his rural speech by an English teacher upon entering Louisa County High School in 1925. He became acutely conscious of his own speech patterns and realized they were inseparable from the identity and character of native mountain people. In his long career teaching literature, speech, and drama at Appalachian State University, he took care not to embarrass his own students from the mountains. Fearing that teachers could “do damage” to their students’ speech, he instead cultivated in them self-respect and appreciation for the expressiveness and history of their native language patterns. Williams was keenly interested in the history of Appalachian speech. Calling traditional mountain English “the oldest living dialect” of English.
Williams joined many other scholars in emphasizing its historical legitimacy. They often argued that mountain speech was Elizabethan or Shakespearean, but he was the first to claim a substantial Scotch-Irish component for it, believing that its historical character was determined by the predominance of that group in the eighteenth-century settlement of the region. His principal interest was not in identifying older usages (though he insisted that mountain speakers had “history on their side”) nor in analyzing sounds, grammatical forms, and curious, often archaic vocabulary. Rather, Williams was intent on presenting the unique qualities of mountain speech and showing how the smaller elements of language were used in daily conversation as well as in storytelling and other forms of oral rhetoric.
Mountain culture and values could be understood only when one saw that its language “expressed basic views of life, attitudes, [and] ways of looking at things” and that it was a vivid, powerful medium for expressing the nuances and drama of mountain thought and everyday life. Professionally trained linguists who analyze speech using scientific concepts have objected to Williams’s subjective description of mountain speakers as having “straight jaws” and traditional mountain vernacular as exhibiting “spare economy,” “exactness,” “strength,” “respect for the individual,” “pungency,” and “melody.” He illustrated these qualities with transcriptions and renditions of the region’s speech and tales that were colorful, passionate, and insightful, if sometimes short on technical exactitude. That said, his presentations and essays brought Appalachian English to life more than that of any other scholar or writer.
References: Cratis D. Williams, “Appalachian Speech,” North Carolina Historical Review (Spring 1978) and Southern Mountain Speech (Berea: Berea College Press, 1992).
