Mountain Speech:

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Mountain Speech

• It Aint for Ignoramuses

Ashley M. Coffey
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The Appalachian Region...

• Typically refers to parts of Kentucky, Virginia,
  Tennessee,
• North Carolina, and all of West Virginia (1)
• Settled predominantly by Scots-Irish,
• German, and English
• immigrants
• The oldest mountains in the world
• Predominantly poor farmers, miners,
• and textile workers
• Made nationally visible by The
• Beverly Hillbillies, Loretta Lynn,
• and various other films, series,
• and performers
• Largely isolated b/c of the terrain

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Visible (Socio)linguistic Stereotypes

• Simplified speech
• Slow or lazy variety of American English
• Not systematic or rule-based
• Speech is representative of the intellectual
  capabilities of the
• individual
• Isolation, inbreeding, and ignorance

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• Speakers of Appalachian English have little or
  no trouble understanding standard English, but
  even native speakers of other dialects can find
  it somewhat unintelligible, and foreigners can
  have significant trouble understanding it.

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Phonological Features

• Final consonant clusters, particularly plurals
• - ghosts pronounced ghostes or ghosst

• Intrusive t in clusters
• - Oncet, twicet, three times a lady

• Auxiliary deletion
• - Those girls been sittin there a long
  spell now.

• Glide reduction
• - the long I sound in time or wide
  is actually pronounced with two vowels
• ah ee

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Wash is pronounced w???. standard American
English pronunciation is w?? or w??). Creek
is pronounced k??k (cf. standard English
k?ik). Hollow is pronounced h?l?? (cf.
standard English h?lo?). Hills is pronounced
hilz (cf. standard English h?lz). Participles
and gerunds such as "doing" and "mining" end in
n instead of i?. The pin/pen merger is
complete in Appalachia, and a pen used for
writing is called an "ink pen." Intervocalic "s"
as in "greasy" is pronounced z. People who
live in the Appalachian dialect area pronounce
the word "Appalachia" 'æp?'læt?? or
'æp?'læt?i?, while those who live outside of
Appalachia or at its outer edges tend to
pronounce it æp?'le???.
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Grammatical Features

• A-verb-ing
• He just kept a-beggin and a-bawlin to come
  inside.
• - Solid historical roots in English, possibly
  derived from prepositions
• - Occurs with progressives, including past
  tense, non-past tense, and
• being forms where the tense is found elsewhere
  in the main
• verb phrase.
• - Also occurs in the movement verbs such as
  come, go, and take off.
• - Not found in gerundive constructions or after
  additional prepositions
• - Also restricted by initial syllable stress
  (a-discoverin)
• - Often used to create an alliterative effect
  (A-rockin and a-rollin)

• Multiple negation
• - occurs in many dialects, especially of
  American English

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More Grammatical Features

• S-V Non-concord
• Occurs in 4 distinct categories
• 1. Conjoined Noun Phrases
• Me and my roommate gets in a fight sometimes.
• 2. Collective Noun Phrases
• Some folks makes it from fat off a pig.
• 3. Other Plural Noun Phrases
• My knees was all tore up.
• 4. Expletive there cases
• There was 5 in our family.

• Perfective Done
• You done ate it now!!

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• Nervous as a whore in church
• I aint seen you in a month of Sundays.
• There aint enough room in here to cuss a cat.
• Hes got rocks in his head (and they rattle).
• He shore can make that fiddle talk.

Sayings

• plumb
• right
• younguns
• yuns
• yonder
• kindlin
• fetch
• reckon
• tuckered out
• buggy
• skillet
• chaw
• touched
• hussy
• polecat

Lexicon
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Sources
Wolfram, Walt, and Christian, Donna. Appalachian
Speech. Center for Applied Linguistics. 1976.
Lowe, Wilburn. Speaking Southern A Dixie
Lexicon. Wake Robin Press. 1994. Ison, Isaac
and Anna H. Whole Nother Language. 1993. Hall,
Joseph S. Sayings from Old Smoky. The
Cataloochee Press. 1972. www.wikipedia.org And
much, much personal experience!!