High Mountains Rising (31 page)

English Language

Michael Montgomery

Because language is inseparable from human experience and interaction and because it reflects the complexity of human life, there are many ways of looking at the English language in Appalachia. These perspectives help us understand the history and nature of mountain speech, its forms and functions, and perceptions and ideas about it that have been prevalent for decades and remain embedded in the American mind. John C. Campbell's famous observation of eighty years ago that Appalachia was “a land . . . about which, perhaps, more things are known that are not true than of any part of our country” applies well to the English spoken in the region.
¹
Misconceptions and myths often make separating stock images and beliefs from facts and reality difficult. Only gradually and recently have scholars disentangled stereotypes from the intricacies and put our knowledge about the region's English on a secure footing.

The English spoken in Appalachia has drawn more comment than any other regional variety of American English, the only possible exception being that of the Deep South.
²
Commentators have often stressed one quality above all others: its conservatism. Since the late nineteenth century, scholars, educators, clergy, journalists, and other writers have been struck by its retention of older elements and suggested that mountain speech was a remnant of the past, preserving “Elizabethan” or other earlier stages of development lost elsewhere. Many have also considered it an inferior type of English and an impediment to social mobility and educational progress. The English of Appalachia has thus been said both to have the most respectable of roots and to be an anachronism unsuited for the modern world. Such conflicting views have simultaneously romanticized mountain speech (and by implication its users) as quaint and stigmatized it as improper and “ungrammatical.” Typical is the recent statement of a columnist that “the purest Elizabethan English in the world is still being spoken in these Appalachian regions of North Carolina and Virginia. That along with the bad grammar makes for a distinctive mountain speech which is fast dying out.”
³

This contradictory image of Appalachian English, prevalent since the outside world “discovered” Appalachia after the Civil War and it became a culturally distinct region for other Americans, was molded in part by mountain speakers portrayed in the nineteenth-century fiction of Tennesseans Mary Noailles Murfree and George Washington Harris.
⁴
Stereotypical Appalachian characters have appeared so often and so long in comics, movies, television programs, and tourist shop caricatures that some linguistic usages (e.g.,
plumb, right smart)
are now believed, albeit erroneously, automatically to signify a person from the hills.

Many depictions of mountain English have used “eye dialect” and other contorted spellings to give the impression of illiterate, dialect-speaking characters (e.g., “I jes' tole him ‘t war ez safe ez a unhatched deedie in a aig” from Murfree).
⁵
These seem far-fetched, if not ludicrous, to anyone who hears mountain speech every day, but they are taken seriously by many Americans acquainted with only written portrayals of the region's language. Such spellings “perpetuate the aura of separateness and backwardness of the characters, their language, and their culture” and contribute to Appalachian speech being as misunderstood and as stereotyped as any type of American English.
⁶

In addition to its archaicness and nonstandardness, writers sometimes point out the expressive richness of mountain speech and the verbal dexterity of mountain speakers. These are evidenced in colorful descriptions and place names (Kingdom Come and Hell for Certain in Kentucky), fresh and earthy metaphors (“fly over a field and settle on a cow pile” [“make a poor choice of a mate”],
kick
[“reject in courtship”]), vivid similes (“as ugly as a mud fence daubed with chinquapins,” “meaner than a striped snake”), and abundant proverbs. Also noted with admiration are novel coinages such as conversions of one part of speech to another
(brogue
as a verb meaning “go on foot, wander”;
man-power
as a verb meaning “move by brute effort”) and others that display the adaptability and resourcefulness of mountain speech. Occasionally literary scholars have likened these qualities to Renaissance-era literature or identified them in modern Appalachian writing, attributing them to the fact that communication often remains more oral than written in the mountains. Today many Americans view Appalachia as a valuable storehouse of tradition. Less affected by modern mass culture and literacy and more closely tied to spoken uses of language in wordplay, storytelling, preaching, and the like, mountain English is thought to be special.
⁷
Without doubt “oral rhetoric as an art form has a value to the mountaineer and his descendants that has been abandoned in most other areas of the country.”
⁸
Even so, the many popular ideas about it mean that Appalachian English is a perceived variety as much as a real one. A person
may be labeled as being from the mountains after only a brief hearing and may easily trigger a stereotyped reaction from others.

Many commentators (mainly outsiders) have written about mountain English, from lay people idealizing it as a carryover from a former day to linguists of widely varying scholarship. Their work forms a continuous tradition of study for more than a century, with three overlapping schools differing in approach, motivation, and assumptions.
⁹
All three schools have focused disproportionately on more divergent elements in the language of rural speakers having less formal education and have emphasized the “isolation” of mountain communities that minimized their contact with the larger world.

The first school, which began in the late 1800s and is still found in popular writing, has been preoccupied with the purported older elements. Its writers use the term
Appalachian
generically. They generalize freely about mountain people, viewing their culture as uniform and their communities as homogeneous culturally and geographically, although the writers' experience usually is based on individual communities or a handful of people. The result is labels of questionable validity such as “Appalachia” or “Southern Highlands” to refer to mountain people or their speech en masse.

By the 1890s descriptions of mountain whites as lazy, illiterate, gun-toting feuders had appeared in many American newspapers and had prompted writers to counter such negative images by citing the legitimate historical basis of mountain English. Typical was novelist John Fox Jr.: “In his speech, the mountaineer touches a very remote past. . . . There are perhaps two hundred words, meanings, and pronunciations that in the mountaineer's speech go back unchanged to Chaucer.”
¹⁰
Associating mountain speech with the greatest early authors in the language gave it immediate status, even if it was said to be eroding rapidly. One motivation of this school was antiquarian, to cite and preserve relic material before it disappeared. Along with research on traditional ballads and other cultural phenomena, it sought to give Appalachia a cultural identity in the face of national perceptions of the region and its speech as backward.

This first school relied on correspondences between mountain speakers anywhere and earlier English literature to categorize Appalachian English as “colonial American,” “Elizabethan,” “Shakespearean,” “Chaucerian,” or the like. Such simplistic labels were rarely based on more than a few examples that were exceptional rather than typical usage. Paradoxically, the emphasis of such writers on relics, intended to show the heritage of mountain speech, often reinforced the view that it was ill-suited for modern society.

In the late 1930s linguistic scholars began replacing value judgments and impressionistic generalizations about mountain speech with studies that
were more scientific, detailing when, where, and from whom they collected material, and were more systematic, comparing data from Appalachia and elsewhere. Thus, they relied on concrete information rather than on beliefs or assumptions that individual communities were representative of a large region or that everyone in a community spoke alike.

This second school of research was dominated by two geographically based projects: the
Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada
(which surveyed the Middle and South Atlantic states in the 193os-194os from New York to Georgia) and the
Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE)
, a nationwide project. Linguistic items found by each project to be generally confined to Appalachia are discussed in this chapter. Whereas those working in the first school used the label “Elizabethan” and sometimes claimed that Shakespeare and his contemporaries would find themselves almost at home in modern Appalachia, linguistic geographers and scholars of the second school have favored a fuller, more objective view of the evidence for the extent of archaism in mountain speech. Joseph Hall, the first linguist to interview a cross-section of mountain people and an early exponent of this school, discounted the claim early in his work: “Great Smokies speech is not Elizabethan English transplanted to America.”
¹¹

A third school developed in the 1970s using conversational interviews to document complexities in mountain English. Unlike atlas studies that surveyed broad areas mainly for vocabulary, those of this type involved detailed, quantitative analysis of grammar and pronunciation from a cross-section of speakers in individual communities. This sociolinguistic approach enabled researchers to show both social variation and linguistic variation by using “standard English” as a basis for comparison.
¹²
It has studied change in progress by correlating speech differences with age differences and has been particularly effective in relating language variation to such educational issues as the learning of reading and writing.
¹³
Like the first school but unlike the second, it has used “Appalachian English” loosely, basing the label on the speech of individual communities.

In part by using the research of these schools, the rest of this chapter explores five perspectives on Appalachian speech, their implications, and some conflicts between them. These perspectives raise several broad issues. On what basis can we define and isolate “Appalachian English”? Is its distinctiveness mainly geographic, historical, linguistic, social, or cultural? To what extent is it real and to what extent only perceived? Why is it one of the most recognized and stigmatized varieties of American English today?

Appalachia, as defined since 1965 by the Appalachian Regional Commission using socioeconomic criteria, encompasses all of West Virginia and parts of twelve states from western New York to northern Mississippi. This
territory is too large to represent a distinct or unified geographic region in traditional culture or speech. With
Linguistic Atlas
research, geographers have identified not “Appalachia” but a related region they call “Midland.” This broader dialect area stretches southwest from its cultural and linguistic seed bed in central Pennsylvania, from where English spread after first being planted in the region in the eighteenth century. The Midland is subdivided into the North Midland (northern West Virginia, northern Maryland, and most of Pennsylvania) and the South Midland (southern West Virginia, western Virginia, and western North and South Carolina; the
Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States
surveyed only Eastern states).
¹⁴

Hans Kurath, director of the atlas, outlined the geographic and historical settlement of the region by Europeans, especially by Germans and Scotch-Irish, and laid the foundation for understanding the region's linguistic development.
¹⁵
But settlement history only begins the story of the coming of the English language. Several factors militated against Appalachia evolving into a sharply distinct, cohesive dialect area.

Settlement by different groups or different proportions of groups from one place to another produced local variations within Appalachia, and sections retained different portions of original language patterns. Migration within the region has taken place since early days, mixing the language of English, Scotch-Irish, Germans, and other settler groups in various ways, leveling differences, and spawning innovations. Contrary to impression, the language of Appalachia has always been in flux.

It is therefore not a surprise that
Linguistic Atlas
research found only seventeen words and phrases to occur predominantly in the Midland region as a whole:
bawl
(a calf's cry),
blinds, green beans, hull
(“to shell”),
lamp oil
(“kerosene”),
lead horse, (arm) load, (little) piece
(“snack”),
poke
(“paper bag”),
skillet, snake feeder, sook
(call to cows),
spouting/spouts, sugar tree, quarter till, want off
, and
you'ns.
¹⁶
It identified no pronunciations confined to the South Midland (which encompasses much of central and southern Appalachia) and concluded that it was a “graded area [having] a unique configuration of dialect features that sets it off from the North Midland (Pennsylvania) and from the South. None of the features in this complex are unique in themselves; all of them occur in either the North Midland or the South. . . . Historically . . . it is a blend of Pennsylvania and Southern features, graded from north to south.”
¹⁷

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.