High Mountains Rising (32 page)

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 were 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”).