American Language Supplement 2 (35 page)

One of the first Northerners to leave an account of his observations in the South was William Attmore, a Philadelphia merchant who visited North Carolina in 1787 to collect some lethargic accounts. In his diary for December 6 of that year he wrote:

To tote
, of course, was not a North Carolinaism, nor was it new, for it had been recorded in Virginia in 1677, and there were many other records of it before 1787. Wentworth finds it in use from Maine to Oregon, but the DAE marks it “chiefly Southern,” and Noah Webster called it “a word used in slave-holding countries, said to have been introduced by the blacks.”
²
But it is highly characteristic of all the dialects spoken in North Carolina today – Appalachian, Tidewater and Lowland Southern.

The earliest study of the State’s speech that I am aware of was contributed to
Dialect Notes
in 1918 by J. M. Steadman, Jr.
³
Nearly all the words and phrases on the list might have been found in a dozen other States, but there were nevertheless a few that have not, so far, been recorded elsewhere,
e.g., frensy
(or
frency
), the withered, dry leaves of tobacco or cotton;
high-bob
and
scoots
, a high-chair;
to nullify
(or
nellify
), to balk;
shoe-round
, a dance;
to see monkeys
, to be overcome by the heat;
swamp-root
, moonshine whiskey, and
sore-back
, a Virginian.
⁴
Four later word-lists from North Carolina were published in 1944
⁵
and a fifth in 1946.
⁶
Like the Steadman list they consisted largely of locutions common to
the whole South and a good part of the North, but again there were some exceptions,
e.g., foot-pie
, an apple turnover;
goochy
, goosy;
lazy-gal
(or
lazy-wife
), a bucket running along a rope, used to bring water from a spring;
to softmouth
, to wheedle;
to talk short
, to speak angrily;
aboon
, above;
to belch back
, to rebound;
cha-cha
, the katydid;
dogwood Winter
, a spell of cold after dogwood is in blossom;
¹
lap-baby
a child in arms;
sanky-poke
, a traveling-bag;
tourer
, a tourist; and
to unfeed
, to defecate. These came from all over the State – some from the mountains to the west, some from the low-lying and isolated coast country, and some from the Yadkin region, settled largely by Germans. The latter began to filter in in 1709, and their descendants continued to use German,
e.g
., in church services, until
c
. 1850. The language is now forgotten, but it has probably left some sediment in the English of the area.

The dialect of the North Carolina coast differs considerably from the Tidewater speech of Virginia and South Carolina. It shows a number of archaic terms that seem to be survivors of the first settlements. An early report on it, published by Collier Cobb in 1910,
²
was chiefly devoted to these archaisms. A number of them have not been reported from other places in the United States,
e.g., acre
, a furlong;
may
, a sweetheart;
kelpie
, a water-sprite;
to scoop
, to run away;
cracker
, a boaster;
to bloast
, to brag;
bloater
, a chubby child;
cant
, gossip;
to abrade
, to sicken;
birk
, a smart young fellow; and
fause
, a tidal creek; but nearly all of them are to be found in the English dialects. Cobb also listed some curious pronunciations,
e.g., buer
for
butter, egal
for
equal, leuch
for
laugh, plead
for
pleased, fant
for
infant, fole
for
fool
, and
wharrel
for
quarrel
. He described the dialect as the language of “the better classes, or at least the middle classes, in England in the days of Elizabeth.” He noted that, even in 1910, improving communications with the mainland – there called the country – were wearing it down.
³

Elizabeth Jeannette Dearden, in her study of the materials accumulated by the late Guy S. Lowman, Jr., for a projected South Atlantic States section of the Linguistic Atlas, shows that the division between
Appalachian and General Southern speech lies more to the eastward in North Carolina than in Virginia. This she explains on the ground that “the Virginia Piedmont was settled by expansion from the coast,” whereas that of North Carolina “was settled to a large extent by the Scotch-Irish and Germans who pushed out into the uplands from the mountains.” “This area in North Carolina,” she continues, “has acquired nowhere near the linguistic prominence and uniformity of the Virginia Piedmont.… There has been a spreading of mountain terms down the Cape Fear river.” The isoglosses separating the mountain speech from that of the Piedmont enter North Carolina somewhere between Surrey and Warren counties. They are not very clearly marked, and a large area shows mixed speech. The extension of Piedmont speech eastward is blocked by the so-called pine barrens, where new terms “are stopped short because of the sparsity of the population and the high rate of illiteracy.” There are many speech-pockets on isolated peninsulas along the coast: they show archaisms that have disappeared further inland, and no two of them are quite alike. Plans for a more comprehensive and scientific survey of North Carolina speech are now being furthered by George P. Wilson, secretary-treasurer of the American Dialect Society, and Hans Kurath. Wilson is accumulating word-lists, and Kurath is seeking to augment and analyze the material gathered by Lowman.
¹

I have been unable to find any report on the speech of North Dakota. Apparently it differs but little, if at all, from that of the adjoining States, especially Nebraska and Minnesota.

Ohio, with an area of 41,222 square miles (nearly that of England) and a population of more than 7,000,000, shows a number of
diverging speech areas, though most of its people speak General American. In the Western Reserve, comprising thirteen counties in the northeastern corner of the State, there is still some evidence that most of the early settlers came from New England, and in the extreme south, along the Ohio river, there are equally plain tracks of Southern influence. Also, there are areas in which foreign immigration has left its mark, notably that of Cincinnati, which was settled largely by Germans. Some surviving New England pronunciations in Hudson township, which straddles the Cuyahoga river just below Cleveland, were noted in the first issue of
Dialect Notes
(1890) by N. P. Seymour,
¹
but he had to add that many that had been familiar in his youth were beginning to disappear,
e.g., sneck
for
snake, bury
to rhyme with
fury, put
to rhyme with
hut, deestrict
for
district
, and
cheer
for
chair
. In 1917, John S. Kenyon, a highly competent phonologist born in 1874 in Medina county, also just south of Cleveland, contributed some valuable observations on the pronunciation of that country in his youth,
²
and in 1921 he followed with a few corrections.
³
Nearly all the terms he listed were of New England origin, and he himself traced the genealogy of most of them, but there were also a small number borrowed from non-Yankee immigrants,
e.g., shillalah
from the Irish and
wampus
from the Pennsylvania Germans. In 1890 J. M. Hart and other members of the Philological Society of the University of Cincinnati contributed some local notes to
Dialect Notes,
⁴
but only one of the words they offered showed German influence, to wit,
allerickstix
, which was described as a schoolboys’ term meaning
all right
(Ger.
alles richtig
).

In 1916 W. H. Parry dealt with the dialect of six counties in the southeastern part of the State, three of them fronting on the Ohio river and facing West Virginia.
⁵
This area, he said, was settled by two streams of immigration, the first coming from New England by way of the river and the second from Maryland, Virginia and southern Pennsylvania over the mountains. The result was a mixed speech with some curious oddities,
e.g
., the insertion of
r
between
u
or
e
and
sh
, as in
rursh
(
rush
) and
frersh
(
fresh
). “Occasionally,” said Parry, “there is a sentence arrangement peculiar to German, such as the use of
once
as the German
einmal
and the use of the verb at the end of the sentence.”
¹
His list showed only a few terms not reported from other parts of the country,
e.g., tucks
, rheumatism;
bone-eater
, a dog, and
dry-hole
, a stupid person (from the oil field term).
²

There has been a natural and considerable interchange of words and phrases between one part of Ohio and another, and the well-known Germanist, Dr. R-M. S. Heffner, who was born in 1892 at Bellefontaine, in the west central part of the State, testifies that New Englandisms were common there in his boyhood, though the area lies “well out of the sphere of influence of the Western Reserve.
³
He reports, indeed, that of the thousand-odd forms from the Maine coast listed by Dr. Anne E. Perkins in 1927 and 1929
⁴
no less than 630 are “entirely familiar to my ear from the usage of my father and his friends.” The elder Heffner was born in Logan county, in which Bellefontaine is situated, and “his parents came over the mountains to Ohio from Pennsylvania.” The speech of Athens, O., the seat of Ohio University,
⁵
has been reported by Lewis A. Ondis.
⁶
Athens is in the southeastern part of the State, adjoining the area discussed by Parry in 1916. Ondis says that the peculiarities he lists “are found on all social levels, including town officials, business people and even native school teachers,” and that they “are quite general over an area of about thirty or forty miles about Athens, reaching the vicinity of Lancaster and Chillicothe.” “The continual flow of students from all parts of the country and
the permanent faculty of Ohio University,” he continues, “have had hardly any influence on the natives.” I quote from his paper:

Ohio, of course, is in the area being investigated by Albert H Marckwardt and his collaborators for the projected Linguistic Atlas of the Great Lakes and Ohio valley regions. They have already gathered material from the towns of Hiram, Medina, Ottawa, Mt. Vernon, Richmond, Bear’s Hill, Worthington, Reynoldsburg, Marietta and West Union. In 1930 Hans Kurath, then of Ohio State University and later editor-in-chief of the Linguistic Atlas, made a detailed report upon the speech of a young woman junior at the university.
¹
The subject was a native and lifelong resident of Columbus, born of a father of German ancestry (though he did not speak German), and a New England mother. Henry Sweet’s “The Young Rat” was used to test her speech, which was recorded in a modification of the IPA alphabet. My impression is that this record shows a good specimen of General American, with a few Southern influences.
²

The educated Oklahomans speak General American, and in the speech of the lowly Okies there is little to distinguish it from that
of the adjacent wilds, especially the Ozark regions of Missouri and Arkansas. As far as I know, there has been no published study of the local vocabulary. A brief glossary appears in “Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State,” one of the WPA’s series of State guidebooks,
¹
but it is confined to oil-field terms. In 1938 Floy Perkinson Gates made a report on some of the words and phrases used in the Dust Bowl,
²
but offered no evidence that they were peculiar to Oklahoma. They included
black blizzard
, a very severe storm;
black roller
, of the same meaning, and
dust pneumonia
, apparently a variety of silicosis. Dean E. H. Criswell, of the University of Tulsa, has collected material from a dozen counties, and has interested some of his students in English in the work, but it will take a number of years to cover so large a State.
³