Appalachian English

Appalachia

Appalachian English is the variety of American English native to the central and southern Appalachian region of the Eastern United States. Typically, Appalachian English is classified under the larger family of Southern U.S. English, of whose sound system it shows the most advanced features. The Atlas of North American English identifies the "Inland South" dialect region, in which the Southern dialect vowel shift is the most evolved, as centering around the Appalachian cities of Knoxville and Chattanooga, Tennessee; Birmingham, Alabama; and Asheville, North Carolina. The Appalachian dialect is rhotic and characterized by distinct phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon. It is mostly oral but can also be written and appears in some known literary works.

Appalachian English has long been criticized both within and outside of the speaking area as an inferior dialect, which is often mistakenly attributed to supposed laziness, lack of education, or the region's relative isolation. American writers throughout the 20th century have used the dialect as the chosen speech of uneducated and unsophisticated characters, though research has largely disproven these stereotypes; however, use of the Appalachian dialect is still often an impediment to educational and social advancement.

Extensive research has been conducted since the 1930s to determine the origin of the Appalachian dialect. One theory is that the dialect is a remnant of Elizabethan (or Shakespearean) English which had been preserved by the region's isolation. Another theory suggests that the dialect developed out of the Scots-Irish and Anglo-Scottish border dialects brought to the region by some of its earliest British Isles settlers. Recent research suggests that Appalachian English developed as a uniquely American dialect as early settlers re-adapted the English language to their unfamiliar frontier environment. This is supported by numerous similarities between the Appalachian dialect and Colonial American English.

Speakers of Appalachian English have no trouble understanding standard English, but even native speakers of other dialects can find it somewhat impenetrable (compare the similar situation of Glasgow English and London English), and foreigners may have some trouble understanding it, while others may find it easier to comprehend. The characteristic syntax and morphology of Appalachian English gives way to more standard forms in schools, public speaking venues, and courts of law, but the phonology is likely to remain the same.

Phonology

Phonetics

• The Southern Shift and Southern Drawl: A vowel shift known as the Southern Shift, which largely defines the speech of the Southern United States, is the most developed both in Texas English and here in Appalachian English (located in a dialect region which the Atlas of North American English identifies as the "Inland South"). This involves several unique vowel changes, in three complex stages:
  • Stage 1: In the diphthong /aɪ/, the second half of the diphthong is often omitted, and it is thus pronounced similar to [äː]. (Thus, for example, the word tide in this dialect may sound to outsiders more like Todd or even tad). In extreme instances, words such as "wire," "fire," "tire," and "retired" are pronounced so as to sound completely identical to the words "war," "far," "tar," and "retard" respectively.
  • Stage 2: The diphthong /eɪ/ begins further back and open in the mouth, so that, for example, fish bait and old lace in this dialect may sound to other English speakers more like fish bite and old lice. The vowel /ɛ/ then moves in the opposite direction and acquires a "drawl" or longer, glide-like sound quality, so that red may be said to sound more like ray-ud or rih-yud. Stage 2 is most common in heavily stressed syllables.
  • Stage 3: The vowel /ɪ/ is pronounced higher in the mouth and with a drawl, so that hit may be said to sound like hee-it. Conversely, the vowel /i/ lowers and then glides up again, so that feet may sound more like fih-eet or fuh-eet. Stage 3 is most common in heavily stressed syllables.
• The word "oil"—which is pronounced in standard forms of English with two distinct vowels, almost like "aww-yull"—is pronounced instead as "uhll" (with the vowel part of the word pronounced like the vowel sound in "book").
• Lax and tense vowels often neutralize before /l/, making pairs like feel/fill and fail/fell homophones for speakers in some areas. Some speakers may distinguish between the two sets of words by reversing the normal vowel sound, e.g., feel may sound like fill, and vice versa.
• Short "i" and short "e" have the same pronunciation when appearing before "n" or "m" (e.g., "pen" and "pin" are both pronounced "pin"). Adjectives are often used to distinguish between the two (e.g., "ink pen").
• Words with "o" in the middle, tend to be "drawn". For example, the "o" in "home" becomes "holm" or "huh-ohm". This drawing of the "o" is common in southern Ohio and Pennsylvania, and may occur in regions bordering western Appalachia.

Phonemic incidence

Research suggests that the Appalachian dialect is one of the most distinctive and divergent dialects within the United States.

• An intrusive R occurs in some words such as wash, leading to the pronunciation /wɔɹʃ/.
• An -er sound is often used for long "o" at the end of a word. For example, hollow— "a small, sheltered valley"— is pronounced /ˈhɑlər/, homophonous with holler. Other examples are "potato" (pronounced "tader"), "tomato" (pronounced "mader"), and "tobacco" (pronounced "backer").
• H retention occurs at the beginning of certain words. It, in particular, is pronounced hit at the beginning of a sentence and also when emphasized. The word "ain't" is pronounced hain't.
• Participles and gerunds such as doing and mining end in /ɪn/ instead of /ɪŋ/. While this occurs to some extent in all dialects of American English, it possibly occurs with greater frequency in Southern Appalachia.
• Word final a is sometimes pronounced /i/, as in okra (/ˈo kʰɾiː/).
• Intervocalic s in greasy is pronounced /z/, as in other Southern American and some British speech. A related matter: The noun "grease" is pronounced with an "s," but this consonant turns into a "z" in the adjective.
• People who live in the Appalachian dialect area or elsewhere in the South pronounce the word Appalachia with a short "a" sound (as in "latch") in the third syllable, /ˈæpəˈlætʃə/ or /ˈæpəˈlætʃiə/, while those who live outside of the Appalachian dialect area or at its outer edges tend to pronounce it with a long "a" sound (as in "lay"), /æpəˈleɪʃə/.

Grammar

Conjugation of the verb "to be"

The conjugation of the verb "to be" is different from that of standard English in several ways, and there is sometimes more than one form of the verb "to be" acceptable in Appalachian English.

Divergence from standard English conjugation of the verb 'to be' occurs with the highest frequency in the past tense, where grammatically plural subjects also take the singular form 'was' rather than 'were'. Thus, the paradigm of the verb 'to be' in Appalachian English more closely resembles the paradigm for other non-'be' verbs in English, where the past tense takes a single form, regardless of number or person.

The use of the word ain't is also one of the most salient features of this dialect. While "ain't" is used to some extent in most American English dialects, it is used with much greater frequency in the Appalachian dialect.

Conjugation among other verb types

While the greatest amount divergence in subject-verb concord occurs in the past tense of the verb 'to be', certain types of plural subjects have an effect on concord across various types of verbs. However, plural subjects continue to show the greatest frequency of non-concord. The example below is taken from Wolfram and Christian:

Conjoined Noun Phrases:

• "Me and my sister gets into a fight sometimes."
• "A boy and his daddy was a-huntin'."

Collective Noun Phrases:

• "Some people makes it from fat off a pig."
• "People's not concerned."

Other Plural Noun Phrases:

• "...no matter what their parents has taught 'em."
• "The cars was all tore up."

Expletive 'there':

• "There's different breeds of 'em."
• "There was 5 in our family."

A-verb-ing (also known as 'a-prefixing')

An intriguing feature of Appalachian English is the a-prefix which occurs with participle forms ending in -ing. This prefix is pronounced as a schwa [ə]. The a-prefix most commonly occurs with progressives, in both past and non-past tenses. For example, "My cousin had a little pony and we was a-ridin' it one day" Common contexts also include where the participle form functions as an adverbial complement, such as after movement verbs ('come', 'go', 'take off') and with verbs of continuing or starting ('keep', 'start', 'get to'). An example of each being: "All of a sudden a bear come a-runnin'", and "He just kep' a-beggin'".

However, the a-prefix may not be attached to a verb which begins with a relatively unstressed syllable, such as 'discover' or 'retire'.

While much less frequent or productive, the a-prefix can also occur on participles ending in -ed, such as "a-haunted"

The a-prefix has been found to occur most frequently in more animated or vivid narratives, as a stylistic device.

Wolfram & Christian's study suggests that a-prefixing is more common with older speakers. Because of the considerable difference of a-prefixing frequency according to age (the frequency varied between 10% and 50%), the authors state that their findings support the "(...) contention that a prefixing is a phenomenon that is dying out in Appalachia". As their study was already published in 1976, it highlights the demand for research which considers more recent data.

A-prefixing can be traced back to the 16th century: The construction reached its height from 1500-1700 and developed out of using the preposition "on" and a verbal noun ending in -ing. Only used in formal and educated writing in the 17th century, it became nonstandard in the 18th century.

Other verb forms

• Sometimes the past participle of a strong verb such as "do" is used in place of the past tense. For example, "I done it already" instead of "I did it already" or in the case of the verb "see," "I seen" instead of "I saw." "Went" is often used instead of "gone" as the past participle of the verb "to go." She had went to Ashland. Less frequently, "gone" is used as the simple past tense. I gone down to the meeting, but wasn't nobody there. "Done" is used with the past tense (or a past participle commonly used as a past tense, such as "gone") to express action just completed, as in, "I done went/gone to the store".
• Some English strong verbs are occasionally conjugated as weak verbs in Appalachian English, e.g. "knowed," and "seed."
• The construction "don't...no" is used with transitive verbs to indicate the negative, e.g. "He don't know no better." This is commonly referred to as the double negative, and is either negative or emphatically negative, never positive. "None" is often used in place of "any," as in "I don't have none."
• Verb forms for the verb "to lay" are used instead of forms of the verb "to lie." For example, "Lay down and hush."
• "Might could" is sometimes used where a speaker of standard English would say, "might be able to" or "could maybe."
• Measurements such as "foot" and "mile" often retain their singular form even when used in the plural sense. For example, "That stick is 3 foot long", or "We need 6 foot of drywall". "Foot" in the singular is standard in UK English.

Double nouns

Some nouns are spoken in pairs, the first noun describing the seemingly redundant second noun, as in "hound dog", "Cadillac car", "widow woman", "toad frog", "biscuit bread", or "rifle gun".

Pronouns and demonstratives

"Them" is sometimes used in place of "those" as a demonstrative in both nominative and oblique constructions. Examples are "Them are the pants I want" and "Give me some of them crackers."

Oblique forms of the personal pronouns are used as nominative when more than one is used (cf. French moi et toi). For example, "Me and him are real good friends" instead of "He and I are really good friends." Accusative case personal pronouns are used as reflexives in situations which, in American English, do not typically demand them (e.g., "I'm gonna get me a haircut"). The -self/-selves forms are used almost exclusively as emphatics, and then often in non-standard forms (e.g., "the preacher hisself"). Second person pronouns are often retained as subjects in imperative sentences (e.g., "You go an' get you a cookie").

Other grammatical forms

'Liketa'

In Appalachian English, the form 'liketa' functions as an adverb and occurs before the past form of a verb. 'Liketa' carries a meaning similar to "on the verge of" or "came so close that I really thought x would", where x is the subject of the verb. It also serves as an intensifier. For example:

• "I liketa never went to sleep last night."
• "And I knew what I'd done and boy it liketa scared me to death."

'Liketa' also imposes a notion of counter factuality on the clause in which it appears, distinguishing it from the word 'almost'. For example, you could say "They almost made it to the top of the mountain", but "They liketa made it to the top of the mountain" would be incorrect. 'Liketa' does not carry the same notion of partial truth as 'almost'.

Other

• Pronouns and adjectives are sometimes combined with "'un" (meaning "one"), such as "young'un" to mean "child", "big'un" to mean big one, and "you'uns" to mean "you all". Young'n' and 'big'n' also are commonplace in northern UK vernacular English.
• The word element "-ever" is sometimes reversed in words such as "whatever" ("everwhat"), "whoever" ("everwho"), and "however" ("everhow"), but the usage remains the same (e.g., "Everwho did this is in big trouble").
• The word right can be used with adjectives (e.g., "a right cold morning") and along with its standard use with adverbs can also be used with adverbs of manner and time (e.g., "right loud" or "right often"). This is an acceptable formation in some areas of UK English.

Lexicon

The Appalachian dialect is part of the greater Southern dialects. In its relation to south of the Midland, it has several terms in common with its North Midland counterpart, including poke (paper bag), hull (to shell), and blinds (shutters). Certain German-derived words such as smearcase ("cottage cheese"), however, are present in the North Midland dialect but absent in the Appalachian dialect.

The following is a list of words which occur in the Appalachian dialect. These words are not exclusive to the region, but tend to occur with greater frequency than in other English dialects.

• Afeared: afraid.
• Airish: cool or chilly
• Ary: any
• Bald: n. a treeless mountain summit (See Appalachian balds).
• Ball-hoot: v. to drive recklessly fast on dangerous rural or mountain roads; derived from an old logging term for rolling or skidding logs downhill.
• Blinds: n. window shades or window shutters. While blinds usually refers to window shades, in Appalachia and the greater Midland dialect, it can also refer to window shutters.
• Blinked: sour, rotten
• Boomer: Small red squirrel
• Brickle: brittle.
• Caps: popcorn
• Cat-head: a large biscuit.
• Chancy: doubtful.
• Chaw: a wad of chewing tobacco.
• Clean: verb modifier which is used to mean entirely completing an action. Can be used in place of 'all the way', e.g., "He knocked it clean off the table."
• Coke: short for Coca-Cola, but applied to all flavored, carbonated sodas, regardless of brand, flavor or type. Coke is used primarily in the southern half of the dialect region, whereas pop receives more usage in southern Ohio, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and most of Southwest Virginia.
• Cornpone: Skillet cornbread made without eggs.
• Counterpane: bedspread.
• Cove: a valley between two ridges.
• Discomfit: v. inconvenience.
• Directly: later, after a while, when it becomes convenient, soon, immediately (largely depending on context).
• Dope: n soda
• Fireboard: Mantel.
• Fit: used in place of the word "fought".
• Fixin':
  • a serving or helping of food. Can I get a fixin' of dumplings?,
  • an event, party or social function where food is served. They're having a fixin' at church next Friday.
  • about to, They're fixin' to get hitched.
• Gaum: n. mess. gaum (gôm); also used as a transitive verb: "to gaum up" (i.e., "to mess up").
• Flannel cake: pancake.
• Haint: used in the context of "ghost" or "spirit" not the derivation of "aint"
• Holler: n. hollow, as in a valley between two hills, e.g., "...I...continue to travel between hollers and cities."
• Hull: v. shell, as in to shell beans.
• Ill: bad-tempered.
• Jacket: n. vest.
• Jarfly: cicada.
• Jasper: n acquaintance
• Kyarn: (Carrion) Dead flesh, such as roadkill. That smells like kyarn.
• Kindly: "Kind of/sort of". e.g., "Just kindly give it a little twist when you throw".
• Lamp oil/coal oil: kerosene.
• Lay out: to be truant (e.g., to "lay out of school" or "lay out of work").
• Meeting: a gathering of people for religious purposes.
• Nary/Nary'ne: none
• Palings: fence posts.
• Peckerwood: A disliked person
• Piece: distance (e.g., "He'd have went up the road a piece to get on the main road").
• Piece: n. snack.
• Plum or plumb: completely (e.g., "Son, you're plum crazy")
• Poke: n. brown paper bag
• Poke sallet: n. a type of salad made from boiled greens (usually pokeweed). Spelled variously salat, salit, and similar variations.
• Pokestock/polkstalk: n. a single shot shotgun; historically a rifle with an unusually long barrel popular with Kentucky frontiersmen.
• Pop: (See Coke above)
• Quare: Queer (totally unrelated to sexuality), strange, odd (as in, "He's shore a quare 'un").
• Reckon: suppose. I reckon you don't like soup beans.
• Right smart: good deal of (e.g., "a right smart piece" for "a long way").
• Scald: n poor land, bad land
• Sigogglin: not built correctly, crooked, out of balance
• Skift: dusting of snow.
• Slap: full, complete (e.g., "...a fall in the river, which went slap-right and straight down").
• Smart: hard-working, "work-brickle." Example: "She's a smart womern—always a-cleanin and a-sewin and a-cookin fer 'er famly."
• Sop: gravy.
• Springhouse: n. a building (usually positioned over a stream) used for refrigeration before the advent of refrigerators.
• Sugar tree: n. Sugar Maple tree.
• Swan: (also swanny) swear; declare to be true.
• Toboggan: n. A knit hat or tuque; rarely used to describe a type of sled.
• Tote: v. To carry, carry
• Tow sack: burlap sack.
• Whistle pig: n. groundhog.
• Yonder, yander: a directional adverb meaning distant from both the speaker and the listener (e.g., "Look over yonder").

Colloquialisms

• Co'-cola: Coca-Cola, but used in the same sense as "Coke" above.

Origins

Early theories regarding the origins of the Appalachian dialect tend to revolve around popular notions regarding the region's general isolation and the belief that the region is culturally static or homogenous. The tendency of Appalachian speakers to retain many aspects of their dialect for a generation or more after moving to large urban areas in the north and west suggests that Appalachian English is conservative rather than isolated. Beliefs about Appalachia's isolation led to the early suggestion that the dialect was a surviving relic of long-forgotten forms of English. The most enduring of these early theories suggested that the Appalachian dialect was a remnant of Elizabethan English, a theory popularized by Berea College president William Goddell Frost in the late 1800s. However, while Shakespearean words occasionally appear in Appalachian speech (e.g., afeared), these occurrences are rare. Most European speech patterns and vocabulary which occur in Appalachian English come from the greater British Isles, rather than just England itself.

The earliest settlers in Southern Appalachia, who arrived in the region in the 18th and early 19th centuries, came primarily from the Anglo-Scottish border country and other areas bordering the Irish Sea. A great number came from Ulster in Ireland, although these were typically resettled Lowland Scots known in the United States as the Scots-Irish. The English dialect of these settlers formed the core of what would later develop into Appalachian English. Examples of Scots-Irish influence include the use of might could for might be able to (cf. Scots and Ulster Scots micht could), the use of "'un" with pronouns and adjectives (e.g., young'un), the use of "done" as a helping verb (e.g., we done finished it), and the use of words such as airish, brickle, swan, and bottom land. The use of double negatives wasn't uncommon in the English Border region in the 17th and 18th centuries. The use of the "a-" prefix (e.g., "a-goin'" for "going") and the attachment of "-ed" to certain verbs (e.g., knowed), originated in South England. Many Appalachian speech habits were used throughout the British Isles, including the h-retention (e.g., hit for it), the use of the word right in the place of rather (e.g., right cold), and the presence of words such as yonder.

While the Scotch-Irish and Northern English settlers had a strong influence on the Appalachian dialect, linguistic analyses suggest that Appalachian English developed as a distinctive dialect among English-speaking people in North America. The Appalachian dialect retains a number of speech patterns found in Colonial American English but largely discarded in Standard speech, such as "r" intrusion (e.g., "warsh" for "wash") and a "y" sound in place of "a" on the end of certain words (e.g., "okry" for "okra"). The southern drawl is of an unknown American origin, although some suspect it originated in African-American English.

Native American influences in the Appalachian dialect are virtually non-existent, the exception being place names (e.g., "Appalachia", "Tennessee", "Chattahoochee River", "Cheoah Mountains"). While early settlers adopted numerous customs from tribes such as the Cherokee and Shawnee, they typically applied existing words from their own languages to these customs.

See also

• Appalachian American

Sources

• O'Grady, William, Dobrovolsky, Michael, and Aronoff, Mark. Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction. Second Edition. New York: St. Martin's press, 1993.
• D.A.R.E., The Dictionary of American Regional English.
• Wright, Laura. Eight grammatical features of Southern United States speech present in early modern London prison narratives. In S.J. Nagle & S.L. Sanders (Eds). English in the Southern United States. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003, 36-63.

External links

• Montgomery, Michael (2006), Annotated Bibliography: Southern and Central Appalachian English, University of South Carolina
• Southern Appalachian English — Transcripts — sound files of interviews with long-time residents of the Great Smoky Mountains conducted in 1939. (University of South Carolina)
• Wylene P. Dial (1969), The Dialect of the Appalachian People