High Mountains Rising

by Richard A. Straw

  Prejudice against Appalachian speakers is especially real in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati, to which tens of thousands of mountain people from Kentucky, West Virginia, and elsewhere have moved in recent decades. Because mountain speech is so stigmatized, its speakers in cities often are not taken seriously. There migrants from Appalachia band together in neighborhoods, maintain strong ties with family “back home,” and use many marked expressions (e.g., extry, you’uns, holler [“hollow”]) while living far from the mountains, supporting the view that Appalachian English is a social as much as a regional variety.

  Too often one still finds the view that dialects are only modifications of standard English, that they are full of “corruptions,” “mispronunciations,” or “ungrammatical usages,” or worse, that their speakers are “linguistically impoverished” and have mislearned English because of social backwardness or even mental deficiency. Writers have been refuting such notions since the late nineteenth century, as by invoking the idea that mountain speech is Elizabethan. But the view that Appalachian English has a respectable heritage is little valued in the classroom or the public arena, and an Appalachian accent has little prestige except among country musicians, stock car racers, and a few other groups. Americans often value history much less than modern perceptions.

  Appalachian speech is both the result and the cause of negative attitudes and prejudice. It became stigmatized by being associated with lower-status speakers from less prosperous parts of the country who had less desirable social characteristics. Subsequently, anyone using forms associated with mountain speech is apt to have the same characteristics attributed to them. The process has become cyclical in that usage reinforces attitudes, with the result that speakers often face unfair attitudes about their ability to learn or do a job. Extension of a negative evaluation of a subordinate group to specific features of language is common in societies in which value systems are in competition, and members of the subordinate group often buy into the evaluation, in this case mountain people believing that they speak “poor English.” Because the term “Appalachian” has so much baggage, middle-class people in the region often eschew the label for themselves but assign it to working-class people living down the road.

  Appalachian English has symbolic value for both insiders and outsiders and plays important roles in community life in the region. In many ways Appalachia is a region in the mind as much as in reality. Outsiders often perceive it as a single entity. Because media images associate the term with economic distress and chronic social problems, residents often apply it, if at all, to a part of the region other than their own. They rarely perceive the mountains in general as a speech region, much less apply “Appalachia” to it, nor are they conscious of subregions within it, such as those identified by linguistic geographers. To their own speech, they usually give such general labels as “mountain” or “country” English or ones that reflect consciousness of the state in which a person lives, such as “Kentucky accent,” “West Virginia dialect,” “North Carolina drawl,” or “East Tennessee brogue.”

  That Appalachia is a perceived region means that many subjective ideas have become attached to it that lack reality but have persisted despite evidence to the contrary. That Appalachia is an alien and unique place geographically, socially, and culturally and other ideas have taken on lives of their own and are now ingrained in the American psyche, becoming cultural myths pertaining to the region’s speech.35

  Another myth is that long-term physical isolation has caused life in the mountains to become static, even frozen in time, and therefore to lag behind other parts of the country. But historians of Appalachia have questioned how much validity this idea has and argued that mountain communities are quite typical of rural America.36 “Isolation” to outsiders may to insiders be “independence,” a desirable condition that grants them freedom. The strong sense of place held by mountain people, the cohesiveness of their communities, and their attachments to traditional lifestyles and values make them less open to change, less inclined to accommodate to mainstream culture.

  Related to the isolation of the mountains is another myth believed by millions of Americans: that in Appalachia time has moved slowly since emigrants landed in Atlantic ports in the 1700s and began moving to the hills. Archaic speechways persisting down to the present, along with traditional ballads, Jack tales, folk dancing, weaving, and other traditions often traceable to Renaissance England and Scotland, might seem perfect examples of cultural preservations intact from centuries past. Yet any study of these traditions reveals that they are living and dynamic and regularly produce, for example, ballads that recount modern tragedies, disasters, and tales of star-crossed love.

  The “Shakespearean myth” was formulated and promoted by people from outside the mountains who, coming to know mountain people firsthand, were intent to identify their positive qualities. However, this idea withstands little objective scrutiny. Its supporters cite only a few items for an assertion about mountain speech as a whole and rarely cite parallels from Renaissance-era authors. Terms cited as Shakespearean are (or until recently were) found in many parts of North America and the British Isles, such as afeard (“afraid”; Midsummer’s Night Dream, act 3, scene 1, line 25: “Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion?”) and learn (“teach”; Romeo and Juliet, act 3, scene 2, line 12: “Learn me how to lose a winning match”). Because Shakespeare and Elizabeth I died more than a century before settlers came to Appalachia, it is unclear how their English was preserved over the intervening generations. Thus, Shakespeare’s speech came to Appalachia indirectly, if it came at all, and it is no wonder that American scholars have spent little time assessing how “Elizabethan” Appalachian speech is. Outside the scholarly world, however, this and related ideas have flourished as cultural myths, improbable as they may be in the modern world. Why? Because even though Appalachia has been neglected, marginalized, and in many ways exploited, the region retains immense significance for countless Americans who lack cultural bearings and cultural memory—who lack roots. Within the region solidarity keeps pressure strong to maintain local speech, much of which seems almost immune to the quixotic efforts of schoolteachers to modify it. Because local speech is integral to people’s heritage and identity in the mountains, it will continue to thrive.

  If Appalachia is a perceived region, one expects to find usages that function as markers of identity and solidarity there, shibboleths that distinguish insiders from outsiders and from insiders who identify with outsiders. One candidate is the pronunciation of Appalachian with the third syllable as latch rather than lay. This development, which has grown steadily since the 1960s, reflects a regional consciousness and a reaction to the pronunciation of the media and government representatives such as War on Poverty workers. It illustrates the continuing tension between those who identify as being from the region and others.37

  No one of the five perspectives is adequate to understand the many roles English has played in the life and history of Appalachia and its people. It cannot be defined by considering only its geography or history, its linguistic elements, or the social and cultural contexts in which it is found. Linguists have often referred to “Appalachian English” in a loose, descriptive way, but they do not accept that a single dialect exists in the region or that the language there differs radically from elsewhere. Mountain speech may often be thought to be the most distinctly regional variety in America, but few of its forms, even relic ones, are unique there. What Appalachia shares with the South in general is far more extensive that what it does not, so Appalachian English can be defined only to a certain extent on the basis of geography. Research has shown how mixed its ancestry is and that in many ways Appalachian English represents a microcosm of American English, so a historical perspective can bring us only so close to defining it as well. Linguistically speaking, Appalachian English is best characterized in terms of the higher frequency and the combination of forms used. Like other American varieties, it is likely t
o continue evolving in some respects toward dominant national patterns because of pressures that are standardizing American culture. But mountain English will persist because its speakers use certain of its features, some archaic and some innovative, to provide the cultural cohesion and continuity that binds them together and to give themselves a meaningful social and regional identity, even in the face of misunderstanding and pressure to conform.

  NOTES

  The author is grateful to many colleagues with whom he has had profitable conversations about Appalachian English over the years. Most notably these include Bridget Anderson, Linda Blanton, Clare Dannenberg, Bethany K. Dumas, Anita Puckett, and Walt Wolfram.

  1. John C. Campbell, The Southern Highlander and His Homeland (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1922), xxi.

  2. James B. McMillan and Michael B. Montgomery, eds., Annotated Bibliography of Southern American English (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1989) includes more than four hundred items on various aspects of southern Appalachian English.

  3. “Tales from Fisher’s River,” Simple Pleasures, Aug. 1988, pp. 2, 25.

  4. Before this time the larger mountain region generally lacked an encompassing name, with reference instead being made to the mountains or “backcountry” of individual states. For an account of developing consciousness of the region, see Henry D. Shapiro, Appalachia on Our Minds: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).

  5. Mary Noailles Murfree, The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 275. “Eye dialect” is visual but not real dialect, that is, words spelled as if to represent dialect but that in reality reflect their common pronunciation (e.g., enuf, likker, sez).

  6. Linda Blanton, “Southern Appalachia: Social Considerations of Speech,” in Toward a Social History of American English, ed. J. L. Dillard (The Hague: Mouton, 1985), 75. If Americans often associate portrayals of mountain speech with Snuffy Smith (originally titled Barney Google), this is not hard to understand; the primary source of the comic strip’s language and shenanigans is George Washington Harris’s tales of Sut Lovingood. See M. Thomas Inge, “The Appalachian Backgrounds of Billy de Beck’s Snuffy Smith,” Appalachian Journal 4 (1977): 120–32.

  7. Bruce A. Rosenberg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).

  8. James Robert Reese, “The Myth of the Southern Appalachian Dialect as a Mirror of the Mountaineer,” in Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings on Southern Appalachia, ed. Robert J. Higgs and Ambrose N. Manning (New York: Ungar, 1975), 490–91.

  9. Walt Wolfram, “On the Linguistic Study of Appalachian Speech,” Appalachian Journal 5 (1977): 92–102.

  10. John Fox Jr., “The Southern Mountaineer,” Scribner’s Magazine 29 (1901): 394–95.

  11. Joseph S. Hall, “Mountain Speech in the Great Smokies,” NPS Popular Study Series 5 (1941): 12.

  12. The principal work in this school is Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, Va.: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).

  13. See Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, “The Language Frontier in Appalachia,” Appalachian Notes 5 (1977): 33–41; Wolfram and Christian, “On the Application of Sociolinguistic Information: Test Evaluation and Dialect Differences in Appalachia,” in Standards and Dialects in English, ed. Timothy Shopen and Joseph M. Williams (Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop, 1980), 177–212.

  14. Hans Kurath, A Word Geography of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1949).

  15. Ibid., 13.

  16. Ibid., 28. Kurath identifies six terms as “North Midland” and five (jacket [“vest”], fireboard, milk gap, sugar orchard, and clabber milk) as “South Midland.”

  17. Hans Kurath and Raven I. McDavid Jr., Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 18–19.

  18. Craig M. Carver, American Regional Dialects: A Word Geography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), 176–78.

  19. Frederic G. Cassidy et al., eds., Dictionary of American Regional English, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, 1985– ).

  20. Carver, American Regional Dialects, 177–78. Carver does not recognize the Midland dialect region and prefers “Upper South” for the subregion others call the “South Midland.”

  21. Walt Wolfram, “Is There an ‘Appalachian English’?” Appalachian Journal 11 (1984): 215–24.

  22. Blanton, “Southern Appalachia,” 88.

  23. For the most in-depth examination of the variety’s origins, see Michael Montgomery, “Exploring the Roots of Appalachian English,” English World-Wide 10 (1989): 227–78; Montgomery, “The Scotch-Irish Influence on Appalachian English: How Broad? How Deep?” in Ulster and North America: Transatlantic Perspectives on the Scotch-Irish, ed. H. Tyler Blethen and Curtis W. Wood (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 189–212.

  24. For a detailed assessment, see Michael Montgomery, “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” in Myths in Linguistics, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (New York: Penguin, 1998), 66–76.

  25. This percentage is higher than for most other varieties, but it indicates that the foremost component of Appalachian speech is its new vocabulary. Both borrowings and inventions, these additions have been a constant necessity as speakers of American English have faced new realities and challenges of environment, culture, and so on.

  26. Edgar W. Schneider, “Appalachian Vocabulary: Its Character, Sources, and Distinctiveness,” in Verhandlungen des Internationalen Dialektologenkongresses Bamberg 1990, Vol. 3, ed. Wolfgang Viereck (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1994), 498–512.

  27. Michael E. Ellis, “The Relationship of Appalachian English with the British Regional Dialects” (M.A. thesis, East Tennessee State University, 1984), 42.

  28. Montgomery, “Scotch-Irish Influence.”

  29. Michael Montgomery, “How Scotch-Irish Is Your English?” Journal of East Tennessee History 67 (1996): 1–33.

  30. Much of the English of Ulster is shared with northern England and Scotland and is, historically speaking, derived from those regions.

  31. Michael Adams, “Lexical Doppelgängers,” Journal of English Linguistics 28 (2000): 295–310.

  32. No community of Gaelic language speakers has been documented in Appalachia.

  33. Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).

  34. Ted Roland Ledford, “Folk Vocabulary of Western North Carolina: Some Recent Changes,” Appalachian Journal 3 (1976): 277–84.

  35. “Myth” refers to a traditional account or explanation of a cultural practice or idea. It affirms some of a society’s deepest beliefs and reveals something about those who hold it. See Michael Montgomery, “Myths: How a Hunger for Roots Shapes Our Notions about Appalachian English,” Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine 17:2 (Summer 2000): 7–13.

  36. Durwood Dunn, Cades Cove: The Life and Death of a Southern Appalachian Community (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988).

  37. Anita Puckett, “On the Pronunciation of Appalachia,” Now and Then: The Appalachian Magazine 17 (Summer 2000): 25–29.

  12

  Literature

  Ted Olson

  In a 1977 article surveying Appalachian literature through the 1970s, scholar and author Jim Wayne Miller illuminated a dilemma inherent in interpreting the literary heritage of Appalachia, a dilemma that has challenged scholars since the early 1960s, when initial attempts were made to assess the existence of a distinctively “Appalachian” literary canon distinguishable from the literature of the American South. Should the main focus of Appalachian literary study be on the works themselves (that is, should we analyze creative writings from the region or by regional authors primarily to discern their qualities as literary works)? Or might Appalachian literature also be mined for sociological re
flection on the region’s cultural life? Without denying the utility of regional literary works for providing information on Appalachian society, Miller cautioned that literary renderings of Appalachian culture are not precisely sociological representations: “Sociologists have found . . . that traditional Appalachian life is characterized to a striking degree by traits such as adult-centeredness, personalism, familism, individualism, attachment to place, and religious fundamentalism. . . . But these traits only become interesting to the literary historian or critic when in literary works they are raised to aesthetic significance as insight into character or as an indispensable part of a literary structure.”1

  Whether or not Miller is right in asserting that aesthetic readings of Appalachian literary works should necessarily supersede sociological interpretations, Miller’s 1977 article eloquently identified two major justifications for studying the Appalachian literary canon from a historical perspective: “Tracing the breaks, reversals, and continuities in interpretations of Appalachia through the literature can contribute both to our understanding and appreciation of the literature itself and to our understanding of the evolving relationship of the region to the rest of the country.”2

  Surprisingly, Miller’s 1977 article is the most recent comprehensive survey of Appalachian literature. Certainly, Miller’s article and the other previously published overviews exploring the region’s literary history are outdated today. Continuing the effort begun by previous scholars, this chapter endeavors to trace the evolution of Appalachian literature from the earliest English-language writings about the region through relevant literary works published at the end of the twentieth century. When addressing literary works written since 1977, I will attempt to elucidate the new themes— as well as the reinterpretations of older themes—that reflect more recent socioeconomic changes within and outside the region. Duly noted will be significant developments in the critical and popular receptions of Appalachian literature, whether works by individual authors or the region’s literary canon as a whole.