Aspects of southern highland life account for the four terms identified by the DARE survey as narrowly Appalachian: spring house, poke (“sack”), whistle pig (“groundhog”), and lay out (“to play truant,” the last confined to southern Appalachia).18 From its historical database covering letters A-O DARE has found 46 items that it labels as predominantly “Appalachian” (defined as extending from central Pennsylvania to northeast Alabama) and 123 as “southern Appalachian” (the southern half of this region), indicating that these were or are concentrated in (but rarely exclusive to) the region.19 This number is deceptive, however, because most of them are quite rare, recessive, or sparsely attested (e.g., briggity, everly, judgmatically). At the same time, DARE labels four times as many terms as “South Midland” (a region including the upland South in their definition), a disparity suggesting that many “Appalachian” terms are now a remnant of a larger vocabulary once more widespread.20 Indeed, DARE labels some items as “now Appalachian,” such as the prefix a- on verbs (as in a-goin) and gaum (“a mess”). That few of DARE’s “Appalachian” items have been noted in popular commentary on mountain speech supports the idea that what is popularly thought to be Appalachian is largely and simply old-fashioned English. In short, most specialists recognize a dialect area that includes southern Appalachia, or less often Appalachia more generally. They do not agree on its dimensions or designation, but few think that Appalachia forms a distinct linguistic territory. Mountain speech varies too much within the region and overlaps with larger territories.
The paucity of geographic evidence has led linguists to debate what other criteria might define “Appalachian English.” One scholar thinks it is best seen as a linguistic entity having a unique “set of co-occurring structures” of grammar and pronunciation that are associated with working-class speakers;21 the Linguistic Atlas reached a similar view regarding the vocabulary of the “Midland.” Another scholar argues that an identifiable dialect called Southern Appalachian English exists “on the basis of cultural solidarity, the boundaries of this dialect [being] more social, more cultural, than geographical.”22 She finds that it has standard and nonstandard subvarieties, both with features considered nonstandard by other speakers of American English (e.g., ain’t, multiple negatives, was with plural subjects). According to these and other researchers, the linguistic basis for Appalachian English lies in a concentration of quantitative differences rather than in the existence of qualitative ones, and social and cultural factors must play a role in defining the term.
The presence of archaisms and curiosity about their alleged Elizabethan origins has produced more study on the sources of Appalachian English than any other regional American variety. This research provides a historical perspective and enables us to evaluate three rival hypotheses about historical antecedents of mountain speech.23 Are they mainly from England, especially from the Elizabethan period? Are they primarily colonial American? Or are they Scotch-Irish, traceable to Ulster? Before examining these rival claims, we must remember that no variety of speech came to North America with out mixing with others upon arrival. Nor has any variety of American English, no matter how isolated or removed from outside influences, remained static. Retentions from older varieties represent only part of the larger history of mountain speech. In particular, writers who propose that mountain speech originated in Elizabethan England have a limited view of its history. They rarely cite the settlement history of the mountains to account for their claim, and there is a good reason why. People of British or Irish extraction who ended up in Appalachia arrived in North America more than a century after the close of the Elizabethan period, and “Elizabethan” has never applied to a regional group of settlers.24 For these and other reasons, the discussion to follow offers a somewhat simplified picture of a very complex situation.
Of the vocabulary, pronunciations, and grammatical patterns that are not shared between Appalachia and the United States as a whole, only about 20 percent can be traced to the British Isles.25 Of this the contribution from England is the most substantial. The source for most Appalachian vocabulary has been England as a whole and to a lesser extent northern England (galluses [“suspenders”], palings [“fence posts”]), western England (counterpane [“bedspread”]), and Scotland (chancy [“doubtful”], sop [“gravy”]).26 One study has found that of seventy-six Appalachian pronunciations considered, most were found in and presumably brought from more than one region of England and that “twenty-eight show a greater similarity with English Southern and West Midland forms, and only four share a greater similarity with Northern forms.”27
Most Appalachian pronunciations (e.g., jine [“join”], sartin [“certain”], obleege [“oblige”]) also came from England generally. A good case for colonial American and English roots can be made for many patterns of grammar. The language of the day was in great flux and had many variants, as in verb principal parts. Knowed and blowed as the past tense and past participle of know and blow do not occur in Shakespeare but were fairly common among eighteenth-century English emigrant speakers. These forms lost favor to knew and blew in social and educational circles after their arrival and are now considered nonstandard in the United States but are still common in Appalachia. Similar forms include fit and holp as the past tense of fight and help. The selective retention of such colonial forms in mountain speech is much larger than the identifiable “Elizabethan” element.
What about the Scotch-Irish from Ulster? Most of the 150,000 emigrants who left that province of Ireland and arrived in the eighteenth century settled in the American interior, and it was their children and grandchildren who often moved into Appalachia and played major roles in developing the region’s culture, especially its music and speech. For a long time the idea of a possibly significant Scotch-Irish element in mountain speech made little headway against the more popular and appealing account of Elizabethan origin.
Recent research has produced some answers.28 Only a scant trace of Appalachian pronunciation was brought from Ulster alone. Scotch-Irish contributions to Appalachian vocabulary (as indicated by DARE) include airish (“chilly, cool”), backset (“a setback or reversal [in health]”), barefooted (“having bare ingredients, undiluted [as of coffee]”), beal (“to suppurate, fester”), biddable (“obedient”), brickle (“brittle”), chancy (“doubtful, dangerous”), creel (“to twist, wrench, give way”), discomfit (“to inconvenience”), fireboard (“mantelpiece”), ill (“bad-tempered”), let on (“to pretend”), nicker (“whinny”), swan/swanny (“to swear”), and take up (“to begin”).29 Some items brought by Scottish or Ulster settlers migrated no farther than Pennsylvania, such as diamond (“town plaza”), flitting (“moving one’s household”), and hap (“quilt”). Few of these or others identified by DARE as Appalachian are commonly used in the region’s speech today.
In grammar the Scotch-Irish component was most significant. Here it was broad and deep, as in the formation of words (e.g., adding ’un [“one”] to adjectives and pronouns, producing young’un, big’un, you’uns, etc.), phrases (e.g., need followed by a verb past participle, as in “That boy needs taught a lesson”), and clauses (e.g., whenever [“at the time that”], as in “Whenever I was young, people didn’t do that”). Thus in many respects Appalachian English represents the language of Shakespeare’s place (southern England) not nearly so much as that of Ulster, the northern province of Ireland.30 Unlike pronunciation, some of these grammatical constructions apparently are not shared with the Deep South; on this basis the two varieties are distinct.
Most DARE terms labeled as Appalachian and many items identified elsewhere in the literature as Appalachian were actually born in America (bald [“treeless area on a mountaintop”], flannel cake [“pancake”]). Of Kurath’s seventeen Midland items, six at most may have come from Ulster. Most of them are unambiguously American in origin and represent responses to the New World (e.g., lamp oil, sugar tree).
Other contributing streams to Appalachian speech were insignificant. Germans wer
e among the first European settlers in Appalachia and were numerous, but other than many surnames in the region they left few linguistic traces outside Pennsylvania, where the German component includes saw buck (“sawhorse”) and smearcase (“cottage cheese”). In Appalachia more generally, German and Scotch-Irish patterns reinforced one another in some cases, as with leave (“let,” as in “leave him go”) and want plus a preposition (as in want in [“want to go/come in”]).31
The inheritance from Gaelic consists mainly of vocabulary (e.g., brogan [“heavy, homemade shoe”], bonny-clabber [“curdled sour milk”], muley [“hornless cow”]) and was absorbed by the English-speaking Scotch-Irish in Ulster before being brought to North America.32 Other European languages such as Spanish (doney [“sweetheart”]) and French contributed even less to Appalachian speech. The absence of influence from Amerindian languages is quite puzzling. So much medicinal and other lore was borrowed by whites from the Cherokee in southern Appalachia and so much of the nomenclature for rivers, mountains, and other topographic features there derives from Cherokee that there is no good explanation for the complete lack of vocabulary (such as the names of plants) borrowed into English.
Because many usages that have already been cited as generally confined to Appalachia are uncommon ones, it is important to get a linguistic perspective on the region’s speech by identifying elements of grammar and pronunciation widely used in the mountains, even though these are also found elsewhere, especially in the Deep South. Their higher frequency of use distinguishes mountain English from other varieties. Common grammatical patterns include the following:
1. a- as a prefix on verb present participles (a-goin’, a-comin’)
2. possessive pronouns with the suffix -n (hern, hisn, yourn, as in “a book of yourn”)
3. verbs whose principal parts have been made regular (blowed, drawed, heared, seed)
4. nouns made plural by adding a syllable (postes, waspes)
5. personal dative pronoun (“I bought me a dog”)
6. done as a helping verb (“He’s done landed in jail again”)
7. personal pronouns hit (“it”) and you’uns (“you [plural]”)
8. all after pronouns to indicate inclusion (what all, who all)
9. verb suffix -s (and linking verb is) with plural noun subjects (but not with pronoun subjects, such as “people knows” vs. “they know”; “people is” vs. “they are”)
10. they (“there”) to introduce clauses (“They’s a problem with Bessie”)
11. verbs with the same form in all tenses (come, eat, run)
12. adverbs used to intensify (“right proud,” “plumb crazy”)
13. addition of -est to form the superlative of adjectives ending in -ing (workingest, singingest)
14. reversal of word elements (everwhat [“whatever”], everwho [“whoever”])
15. prepositions in a series (“Come out from up under the table”; “There was several houses on up around on Mill Creek”)
Of these representative features, numbers 1–5 were brought from England and 6–10 from Ulster. The next three represent a common inheritance from the British Isles, and 14–15 appear to be American developments.
Common patterns of pronunciation include the following:
1. final -a pronounced as -y (opry [“opera”], extry [“extra”])
2. heavy use of r, including addition of the sound to some words (tomater [“tomato”], warsh [“wash”])
3. prolonging and splitting of vowels into two syllables (red as re-uhd or ray-uhd, rib as ri-uhb; this is sometimes known as the “Southern drawl”)
4. shifting the accent to the first syllable of a word (IN-surance, POlice)
5. modification of the “long i” to ah in different contexts, so that my right side sounds like mah raht sahd; wire rhymes with either car or war; tile rhymes with tall
6. same vowel sound in word pairs such as pen/pin and hem/him
7. pronunciation of care, bear, etc., with the vowel of cat (note: bear rarely rhymes with bar in mountain speech)
8. final l reduced or lost in words such as ball, boil
9. same vowel sound in word pairs such as steel/still, sale/sell
Many pronunciations in Appalachia reflect the general English of colonial days. Many others (including 3–6 in the preceding list) represent newer developments that are shared with much of the American South. The dual theme of conservatism and maintenance on one hand and innovation on the other can be observed time and again and in every component of mountain speech. That much of it, as in any American variety, is new is seen especially in the neologisms that have arisen in Appalachia: folk etymologies (bardy grease [“verdigris”], hairy tick [“heretic”]), shortenings (still [“distillery”]), echoisms (jar [“to quarrel, bicker”], knee deep [“bullfrog”]), back formations (galak [“to pick galax”], licen [“license”]), and, most common of all, compounds (happy pappy [“welfare father”], easing powder [“pain relief medicine”]). Yet the processes used to form such novelties are the same as in American English in general.
Because it retains or has created unfamiliar senses of words found elsewhere in the United States, mountain speech often differs more than it first appears and can lead to miscommunication. A forty-year-old woman in the Smoky Mountains recently told me that “a lot of mountain people are kind of backward, but I don’t care to talk to nobody.” By this she meant that others were shy, but she didn’t mind (in fact, she enjoyed) talking to strangers. One man said that he was “hard to hear,” meaning that he had trouble hearing others, not that they couldn’t hear him. Other common words having variant meanings in the mountains include several (“quite a few”), clever (“hospitable”), and ill (“bad-tempered”).
No region, community, or person is uniform in speech. Variation in language takes place along spatial, temporal, social, ethnic, individual, and other dimensions. From a social perspective variation and change in language are natural and universal. They are found in the English of Appalachia for many reasons, including its mixed history, the wide and diverse geographic area in which it is spoken, and the constant pressure of speakers to mold the language to their needs.
Depending on the formality of the situation and their age, level of formal education, type of occupation, ruralness, and other factors, speakers may use many, few, or no features suggesting that they come from Appalachia. Most often preserved by mountain speakers are intonation and speech rhythm, along with rhetorical uses of the language in personal interaction, such as in narrating or recounting personal experiences, 33 and it may be most distinctive in terms of its use of pitch, stress, and vowel length. That Appalachian English is as much a social as a regional variety is demonstrated also when strangers think a person is from the mountains (whether he or she is or not) on the basis of a brief hearing. Features usually cited as typically Appalachian are more strongly used by less educated and working-class speakers. However, many features of pronunciation are used by speakers of all social or educational levels except in northern parts of Appalachia. Examples include modification of “long i” to ah in words such as time and my and the pronunciation of words such as pen and hem as pin as him. In Appalachia and in much of the South, these are entirely “standard.”
Vocabulary varies primarily by subregion within Appalachia or by the age or ruralness of the speaker. Much ongoing change in the region’s speech involves the displacement of older, often rural terms by more modern, national counterparts. One study of local students attending a small western North Carolina college found a striking loss of regional vocabulary; for instance, living room, gutters, mantle, and attic had completely replaced big house, eaves trough, fireboard, and loft.34
Pronunciation and grammar are more likely to be stratified socially and less easily replaced than vocabulary. Linguists have established in recent years that variation in these areas of language is systematic; it operates according to identifiable social factors and structural rules. Examples that take linguistic context
into account, are socially graded within Appalachia, and differ quantitatively from other regional varieties of American speech include verb suffix -s with subjects that are plural nouns but not plural pronouns (“people knows” vs. “they know”); verb prefix a- on present participles, but almost never if they begin with a vowel sound or an unstressed syllable (a-talkin but rarely a-eatin or a-producin); and was used with all subjects, singular or plural (“we was,” “people was”). A fourth example involves modification of “long i” to ah. Many working-class speakers follow this practice in all words and contexts, but some middle-class speakers do so in words such as ride and buy but not sight or hike (i.e., not before “voiceless” consonants). The first two of these examples are disappearing in mountain English and represent changes in progress; the last two are holding their own.
Collectively such rule-based patterns and information about their history demonstrate that mountain speech is not merely an approximation of mainstream or “standard” English, however we might define that. As everywhere else, language in Appalachia is patterned according to social factors, although the factors at play sometimes differ from other places (social class is not as important as in cities, for instance). Generational differences, especially in vocabulary, are the most profound social ones. Formal education is often important as well because it brings speakers into contact with national norms. Among younger speakers especially, education often produces the ability to shift between varieties of English according to the situation at hand. But it may also produce self-consciousness or defensiveness about the way one speaks and lead to conflicts between “home English” and “school English,” that is, between the values of one’s family and knowing one’s place on one hand and the larger world and striving for the mobility to enter it on the other. The pressure on individual speakers to conform to local norms means that in much of rural Appalachia one’s level of education often does not influence the way one speaks very strongly.
High Mountains Rising Page 23
