In the great days of Bleeding Kansas the inmates of the State prided themselves upon the alleged fact that what they called the Kansas language was simpler, franker and more vivid than that of the decadent East. As one of their editors, Nelson Antrim Crawford, has recorded,2 there was “no goddam grammar” in it. Its great professors were the politicians and world-savers who then howled from every stump, but it was also used by the State literati. Crawford reports that it is now vanishing. “Kansas,” he says, “has become a conservative State, and most of its people consciously seek to become like the people of other conservative States. Something resembling the old-time Kansas language … is more likely to be heard today in Iowa or North Dakota than in Kansas.”
Kentucky
What is now Kentucky was the first region beyond the mountains to be settled. Pioneers began to invade it before the Revolution, and by 1782 it had more than 30,000 population.3 It was originally a part of Virginia, and the effort to organize it as an independent State took a great deal of politicking, but it was finally admitted to the Union on June 1, 1792, little more than a year after Vermont, the first new State to come in. During the period down to the War of 1812 many of the neologisms then called Westernisms were coined within its bounds, and some of its early heroes, notably Daniel Boone, made contributions to the store.4 The present speech of the State, like that of Tennessee, ranges from Appalachian to General American, with the latter showing strong Southern influences. The first serious study of it was made by John P. Fruit, of Bethel College at Russelville, in the southwestern lowlands, in 1890.1 Most of the terms he listed belonged to the common stock of vulgar American, especially in the West, e.g., to crawfish; to saw gourds, to snore: gallus, suspenders, and ruckus, a disturbance, but he also found some that have not been reported from other regions, e.g., beastback, horseback; drats, a game of marbles; in a bad row of stumps, in a tight place, and whittlety-whit, fifty-fifty. In 1910 Miss Abigail E. Weeks published in Dialect Notes a brief word-list from Barbourville in the southeastern corner of the State, but it consisted mainly of Appalachian terms.2 A year later Hubert G. Shearin, of Transylvania University at Lexington, in the Bluegrass country, followed with a longer one from that region.3 It offered some oddities in vocabulary, e.g., red-nose, discouragement; dough-beater, a housewife; and slowcome, a lazy fellow, but they were not numerous.
There was then a long wait until 1946, when Miss Virginia Park Matthias and Fred A. Dudley offered brief contributions to the subject. Both confined their inquiries to the Appalachian area. Miss Matthias4 presented some interesting specimens of the local dialect, but most of them were common to the whole Appalachian range and not a few were old in the British dialects: blinky, soured (used of milk), agin (against) as a preposition, as in “He’ll be home agin November,” and favor, to resemble. Among her less familiar terms were latch-pin, a safety-pin; natural-looking, familiar, and waste, a hemorrhage. Dudley5 added caps, popcorn; carton-box, carton;6 hoved out, bulged or warped (used of woodwork) and smother-some, hot and humid.7
Louisiana
“In the State of Louisiana, which was colonized by the French,” said John Russell Bartlett, in the preface to the second edition of his “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States,”1 “there are many words of foreign origin, scarcely known in the Northern States. The geographical divisions, the names of rivers, mountains, bays; the peculiarities of soil and climate; all that relates to the cultivation of the earth, the names of fishes, birds, fruits, vegetables, coins, etc., retain to a great extent the names given them by the first possessors of the country.” So far as I know, no effort was made to study this speech until 1890, when J. W. Pearce, of Tulane University at New Orleans, printed a brief word-list in Dialect Notes.2 Pearce, however, paid no heed to the French sediment in it, but gave his attention mainly to pronunciations in the purely English vocabulary, e.g., axed for asked, riz for rise, jine for join, bender for hinder, maracle or meracle for miracle, and dreen for drain, nearly all of them common to the vulgar speech of the whole country. He was followed twenty-six years later by a colleague at Tulane, E. Riedel, who had a sharper ear for French influence3 and listed a number of characteristic loans, e.g., armoir, a wardrobe; brioche, a kind of cake, gris gris, a magical formula to gain advantage in a game; jambalaya, a hash containing ham and rice; picayune, five cents, and praline, a candy made of brown sugar and nuts, but he somehow contrived to omit lagniappe.4
A little later James Routh, associate professor of English at Tulane and secretary of the American Dialect Society for the Gulf States, began supplying Dialect Notes with longer and better lists.5 His first paper added brulée, an open place in a swamp; flottant, a soft prairie; minnie, a cat (Fr. minet); and kruxingiol, a cake eaten at Mardi Gras (Fr. croquignole); his second, marronguin, a large mosquito; nanan, a godmother; pieu, a fence built of boards; rabais-shop, 2l notion store; briqué, a red-haired mulatto; and to coshtey, to steal (Fr. cocheter); and his third, bidon, a man’s hat; boucan, a smudge fire to keep off mosquitoes; papiettes, curl-papers; and parin, a godfather. He added some English forms apparently of local origin, e.g., little small, a small amount; basin, a channel; down the street, downtown; onfinancial, without money; nick, a pile of wood; to skull-drag and to maul-drag, to do servant’s work, and tin-a-fix, a tinsmith, and recorded the diphthongization of er in boid (bird) and desoive (deserve), as in the Brooklyn, N. Y., dialect.1 To his second list he added a large number of local bird-names, chiefly gathered from notes printed in the New Orleans Picayune, March-July, 1916, by Stanley Clisby Archer, e.g., aigle noir, the golden eagle; becasse, the woodcock; biorque, the bittern; cou collier, the kildee; egret caille, the blue crane; goelan, the gull; moineau, the English sparrow; perdreaux, the quail; and zel rond, the darter.
Pearce, in his pioneer study, had noted what appeared to him to be a German loan, to wit, whatfer, as in “Whatfer man is he?,” from the German was für. He said that it was in common use in Red River parish. This is some distance above the so-called German Coast of Louisiana, which runs along both banks of the Mississippi for about forty miles, beginning twenty-five miles north of New Orleans, and was settled during the Eighteenth Century, but there was early penetration of the Red River valley by the German setlers.2 In the same sense of what sort of the term is recorded by Wentworth in Lebanon county, Pennsylvania, and in West Virginia, western Maryland, central New York, and Iowa—all of them regions showing German influence. Two other possible German loans in the northern part of Louisiana were recorded in 1935, to wit, to cook coffee and the use of until in place of that, as in “I was so hot until I nearly melted.” The former is a common Pennsylvania Germanism, and the latter has analogues in Pennsylvania.1 In this northern part of the State Gallicisms are relatively rare, and the speech in general is that of the Ozarks.2 In the south, however, large numbers of French loans are in everyday use, e.g., banquette, a sidewalk; gabrielle, a loose wrapper; îlet, a city square; jalousie, a Venetian blind; and to make ménage, to clean house.3
With Dr. C. M. Wise of the Louisiana State University in charge, there is now in progress a survey of the State dialects upon a scientific basis, and in the course of a few years it should produce a valuable volume for the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada. Wise was one of the scholars who took instruction in linguistic geography from Dr. Hans Kurath, editor of the Atlas, while Kurath was at Brown University. At the conclusion of this course the General Education Board, acting through the American Council of Learned Societies, established four scholarships in the South for scholars interested in studying its speech, and Wise was appointed for Louisiana. He decided to gather materials for a linguistic atlas of the State, and he and his graduate students have been engaged upon the project ever since. He read a paper describing their work before the Linguistic Society of America in July, 1942, and published a report upon it in Studies in Linguistics in 1945.4 A provisional map that he has prepared shows that the area of French influence runs
northward from the Gulf to the vicinity of Alexandria on the Red river. From there its boundary slopes south-westward to the mouth of the Sabine river, on the Texas-Louisiana border, and southeastward to Baton Rouge and then eastward along the north side of Lake Pontchartrain to the mouth of the Pearl river. In this area, says Wise, there are two phonological marks of the local speech. One is the change of ar, “final in a stressed syllable with or without a succeeding consonant or consonants, and not preceded by the sound of w,” into a vowel resembling the a of chalk and although, so that yard becomes something on the order of yawd. The other is the diphthongization of the vowel in bird, heard, etc., already noted. In the six parishes east of the Mississippi, but north of the French area, the speech is that of Mississippi and the rest of the lowland South. In the region lying along the Arkansas and Texas borders it is that of the Ozarks, which is to say, of Appalachia. A number of Wise’s graduate students have completed intensive studies of the speech of communities in various parts of the State, and all the material amassed is being preserved in quadruplicate.
Maine
“Maine and New Hampshire,” says Hans Kurath, “are the most conservative parts of New England. Both are rural and remote from the great population centers, with large areas that are sparsely settled and have been losing population for several decades. As a result, [they] preserve many dialectal features lost in the southern part of the Eastern area, and they still use currently other features now rare in eastern Massachusetts or losing ground in the Boston area.”1 All this applies, as Kurath explains further on, only to the southeastern coast and the western uplands, both of which were settled by immigrants from Massachusetts. “Northern Maine,” he says, “belongs to the St. John river area of New Brunswick, which was settled by Loyalists from New York, New Jersey and western Connecticut,” and therefore shows the influence of what has now come to be called General American. The dialects of the State have got a great deal of attention from linguists in recent years, and the literature dealing with them is extensive. It begins with a study of that of the Penobscot valley, contributed to Dialect Notes in 1907 by Joseph William Carr and George Davis Chase, of the University of Maine,2 and it runs down to the detailed reports provided by the maps in the Linguistic Atlas of New England.3 Carr and Chase, whose interest was chiefly in vocabulary, called attention to the influence of lumbering upon the speech of Maine, and also to the infiltration of terms from Canada. The investigators who followed1 also devoted themselves mainly to vocabulary, and in their lists were many picturesque locutions that have never been reported, so far as I know, from any other region, e.g., tie-up, a cow-barn; to cousin, to visit relatives; gorming, clumsy, stupid; pizen-neat, over-neat; spleeny, vaguely ailing; hog-wrestle, a country dance; burn, burned-over woodland; matterated, infected; drozzle tail, a slovenly woman; muster-bread, a kind of ginger-bread; claw-off, an excuse; pod, a large belly; all of a biver, excited; all of a high, very eager; booze-fuddle, whiskey; dingclicker, a good-looking woman; dite, a small amount; to gibbet, to punish; nimshy, a young girl; stool, a sill or threshold; potato thump, mashed potatoes; skulch, swill; rent, any house or apartment for rent; snug, stingy; yip, noisy talk; whee-up, a fit of anger; and smutter, a cloud of dust. Some of the survivals of English dialect in the dialect were tracked down and listed by Dr. Anne E. Perkins in 1922,2 and its phonology was discussed by Ezra Kempton Maxfield in 19263 and by W. Cabell Greet in 1931.4 Maxfield thus described two of the Maine vowels:
No alien has ever yet been able to master our so-called short o. It is extremely amusing to hear the actors in alleged “Down East mellerdrama” try to enunciate such words as road, coat, boat, loan and stone.… They say rud, cot, bot, lud and stun.… After puzzling over the phonetics of these words for some years I have discovered that the difficulty lies in thinking that we are dealing with a single vowel. There is no o that represents these words. Instead of a single sound it consists of two vowels so rapidly spoken that only one seems apparent.… Say very rapidly ro-ud, co-ut, bo-ut, lo-und and sto-un, and you will hit it almost in the eye.… Short e is often substituted for short a.… A door ketches if it sticks, and … one consults the kelender to know the date.… Accept sounds identical with except. An officer errests a wrongdoer.
Maxfield said that the Maine a, as in aunt, is not aw or ah, but “something that sounds like ar,… [though] certainly not the gnarled sound that passes for r west of Albany and north of the Mason and Dixon line.… You would be laughed at if you asked the way to Bath (rhymed with lath). You must say Barth.” Greet hears a flat a in aunt, dance, can’t, answer, grass and fast, and says that it “is very flat.” He agrees with Maxfield that o is often a diphthong, but says that it “is not marked.” He goes on:
The first vowel in color is almost a. Was, when stressed, is wahz …; do and due are homonyms.… The final r is usually not pronounced, but the liaison r, as in idear is common.… This is the characteristic speech of the well-to-do citizen of the New England coast and the adjacent regions from Newburyport, Mass., to Lubec, Maine. I have examples from as far inland as Concord, N. H.1
Maryland
The first known study of an American dialect was Jonathan Boucher’s of that of Maryland, written before 1775 though not published until 1832.2 It took the form of a pastoral entitled “Absence” and was accompanied by explanatory footnotes and a glossary. It antedated John Witherspoon’s treatise on American speech by six years.3 Some of the words occurring in it are not traced further back, by the DAE, than Boucher’s text, e.g., wring-jaw, hard cider; cushie, a kind of pancake; eggnog, and belly-bacon. Not many of them, however, appear to have been peculiar to Maryland: they were simply specimens of the general speech of the colonies, e.g., mad for angry, Fall for Autumn, bug for any kind of insect, persimmon-beer, roasting-ear, possum, canoe, hominy, pow-wow, squaw and yam. But one of them, johnny cake, may have originated in Maryland,1 and so may some of the tobacco-growers’ terms listed but not defined, e.g., twist-bud, thick-joint, bull-face and leather-coat. Boucher defined bandore, which he noted was pronounced banjor, as “a rude musical instrument made of the shell of a large gourd or pumpion,2 and strung somewhat in the manner of a violin.” “It is much used,” he added, “by Negroes.”3 He defined pickaninny as “a male infant,” and said nothing of color. Some of his terms were borrowed, with credit, from books on the West Indies4 but he indicated that they had come into Maryland use.5
Since Boucher’s time there has been little study of the speech of the State, but an excellent investigation of that of at least one of the counties, Garrett, has been made by a native thereof, Miss Florence Warnick. This is reported in a pamphlet, “Dialect of Garrett County, Maryland,” printed privately in 1942.6 Garrett county is the westernmost county of the State and is surrounded by Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Geographically, it is part of Appalachia, but its speech has been influenced by immigration from the German areas of Pennsylvania. Some of the German loans noted by Miss Warnick are hutchy, a colt (Ger. dial, hutsch, hutschel or hutschli); ponhoss, scrapple (Ger. pfannhase, panned hare); satz, home-made yeast; snits, sliced and dried apples or other fruit (Ger. schnitz, a slice); what-fer (Ger. was für), and the Pennsylvania German use of all, as in “The butter is all,” i.e., exhausted. She suggests that another word, blage, gossip, may be from the French blague. Many of the terms she lists are obviously Appalachian, e.g., whistle-pig for what is called a ground-hog elsewhere in Maryland, but there are also a few that Wentworth does not find anywhere else, e.g., cabbage-leaves, large ears; to chew, to scold; to cut up molly, to act extravagantly; to dance in the hog-trough, used of an older brother or sister left unmarried after the marriage of a junior; hanover, a rutabaga;1 to make him scratch where he don’t itch, to put in a predicament; pe-pippa, a very little bit; pooch-jawed, fat-cheeked; snoopy, finicky about food; and sollybuster, any unusual thing. Miss Warnick notes that ornery is pronounced onry in Garrett county.
As I have noted in my introductory remarks on American dialects, there are a
t least five speech areas in Maryland. Some incidental mention of them is to be found in “Delmarva Speech,” by W. Cabell Greet,2 but there was no scientific attempt to delimit them until the late Guy S. Lowman, Jr., one of the editors of the Linguistic Atlas of New England, began accumulating material for a similar atlas of the South Atlantic States. At the time of his death he had in hand records of the speech of 400 informants in scattered communities in Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. About a third of these informants were elderly persons who had lived in their birthplaces or nearby all their lives, a second third was made up of middle-aged persons of fair education, and the remainder were college graduates. This somewhat meagre material was worked up in 1940–41 by Miss Elizabeth Jeannette Dearden, a candidate for the doctorate at Brown University under Hans Kurath.3 Miss Dearden found that the line dividing Appalachian speech from that of the Piedmont, represented by the use of [paper] poke in the former and sack in the latter, crosses Maryland from north to south in Washington county, rather less than 100 miles west of Baltimore, and that the lightwood line runs west to east through Washington and Annapolis, and then through Caroline county on the Eastern Shore into Delaware. She said:
American Language Supplement 2 Page 21
