High Mountains Rising (33 page)

No region, community, or person is uniform in speech. Variation in language takes place along spatial, temporal, social, ethnic, individual, and other dimensions. From a social perspective variation and change in language are natural and universal. They are found in the English of Appalachia for many reasons, including its mixed history, the wide and diverse geographic area in which it is spoken, and the constant pressure of speakers to mold the language to their needs.

Depending on the formality of the situation and their age, level of formal education, type of occupation, ruralness, and other factors, speakers may use many, few, or no features suggesting that they come from Appalachia. Most often preserved by mountain speakers are intonation and speech rhythm, along with rhetorical uses of the language in personal interaction, such as in narrating or recounting personal experiences,
³³
and it may be most distinctive in terms of its use of pitch, stress, and vowel length. That Appalachian English is as much a social as a regional variety is demonstrated also when strangers think a person is from the mountains (whether he or she is or not) on the basis of a brief hearing. Features usually cited as typically Appalachian are more strongly used by less educated and working-class speakers. However, many features of pronunciation are used by speakers of all social or educational levels except in northern parts of Appalachia. Examples include modification of “long i” to
ah
in words such as
time
and
my
and the pronunciation of words such as
pen
and
hem
as
pin
as
him.
In Appalachia and in much of the South, these are entirely “standard.”

Vocabulary varies primarily by subregion within Appalachia or by the age or ruralness of the speaker. Much ongoing change in the region's speech involves the displacement of older, often rural terms by more modern, national counterparts. One study of local students attending a small western North Carolina college found a striking loss of regional vocabulary; for instance,
living room, gutters, mantle
, and
attic
had completely replaced
big house, eaves trough, fireboard
, and
loft.
³⁴

Pronunciation and grammar are more likely to be stratified socially and less easily replaced than vocabulary. Linguists have established in recent years that variation in these areas of language is systematic; it operates according to identifiable social factors and structural rules. Examples that take linguistic context into account, are socially graded within Appalachia, and differ quantitatively from other regional varieties of American speech include verb suffix -s with subjects that are plural nouns but not plural pronouns (“people
knows”
vs. “they
know”);
verb prefix
a-
on present participles, but almost
never if they begin with a vowel sound or an unstressed syllable
(a-talkin
but rarely
a-eatin
or
a-producin);
and
was
used with all subjects, singular or plural (“we
was,”
“people was”). A fourth example involves modification of “long i” to
ah.
Many working-class speakers follow this practice in all words and contexts, but some middle-class speakers do so in words such as
ride
and
buy
but not
sight
or
hike
(i.e., not before “voiceless” consonants). The first two of these examples are disappearing in mountain English and represent changes in progress; the last two are holding their own.

Collectively such rule-based patterns and information about their history demonstrate that mountain speech is not merely an approximation of mainstream or “standard” English, however we might define that. As everywhere else, language in Appalachia is patterned according to social factors, although the factors at play sometimes differ from other places (social class is not as important as in cities, for instance). Generational differences, especially in vocabulary, are the most profound social ones. Formal education is often important as well because it brings speakers into contact with national norms. Among younger speakers especially, education often produces the ability to shift between varieties of English according to the situation at hand. But it may also produce self-consciousness or defensiveness about the way one speaks and lead to conflicts between “home English” and “school English,” that is, between the values of one's family and knowing one's place on one hand and the larger world and striving for the mobility to enter it on the other. The pressure on individual speakers to conform to local norms means that in much of rural Appalachia one's level of education often does not influence the way one speaks very strongly.

Prejudice against Appalachian speakers is especially real in cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Cincinnati, to which tens of thousands of mountain people from Kentucky, West Virginia, and elsewhere have moved in recent decades. Because mountain speech is so stigmatized, its speakers in cities often are not taken seriously. There migrants from Appalachia band together in neighborhoods, maintain strong ties with family “back home,” and use many marked expressions (e.g.,
extry, you'uns, holler
[“hollow”]) while living far from the mountains, supporting the view that Appalachian English is a social as much as a regional variety.

Too often one still finds the view that dialects are only modifications of standard English, that they are full of “corruptions,” “mispronunciations,” or “ungrammatical usages,” or worse, that their speakers are “linguistically impoverished” and have mislearned English because of social backwardness or even mental deficiency. Writers have been refuting such notions since the late nineteenth century, as by invoking the idea that mountain speech is Elizabethan. But the view that Appalachian English has a respectable
heritage is little valued in the classroom or the public arena, and an Appalachian accent has little prestige except among country musicians, stock car racers, and a few other groups. Americans often value history much less than modern perceptions.

Appalachian speech is both the result and the cause of negative attitudes and prejudice. It became stigmatized by being associated with lower-status speakers from less prosperous parts of the country who had less desirable social characteristics. Subsequently, anyone using forms associated with mountain speech is apt to have the same characteristics attributed to them. The process has become cyclical in that usage reinforces attitudes, with the result that speakers often face unfair attitudes about their ability to learn or do a job. Extension of a negative evaluation of a subordinate group to specific features of language is common in societies in which value systems are in competition, and members of the subordinate group often buy into the evaluation, in this case mountain people believing that they speak “poor English.” Because the term “Appalachian” has so much baggage, middle-class people in the region often eschew the label for themselves but assign it to working-class people living down the road.

Appalachian English has symbolic value for both insiders and outsiders and plays important roles in community life in the region. In many ways Appalachia is a region in the mind as much as in reality. Outsiders often perceive it as a single entity. Because media images associate the term with economic distress and chronic social problems, residents often apply it, if at all, to a part of the region other than their own. They rarely perceive the mountains in general as a speech region, much less apply “Appalachia” to it, nor are they conscious of subregions within it, such as those identified by linguistic geographers. To their own speech, they usually give such general labels as “mountain” or “country” English or ones that reflect consciousness of the state in which a person lives, such as “Kentucky accent,” “West Virginia dialect,” “North Carolina drawl,” or “East Tennessee brogue.”

That Appalachia is a perceived region means that many subjective ideas have become attached to it that lack reality but have persisted despite evidence to the contrary. That Appalachia is an alien and unique place geographically, socially, and culturally and other ideas have taken on lives of their own and are now ingrained in the American psyche, becoming cultural myths pertaining to the region's speech.
³⁵

Another myth is that long-term physical isolation has caused life in the mountains to become static, even frozen in time, and therefore to lag behind other parts of the country. But historians of Appalachia have questioned how much validity this idea has and argued that mountain communities are quite typical of rural America.
³⁶
“Isolation” to outsiders may
to insiders be “independence,” a desirable condition that grants them freedom. The strong sense of place held by mountain people, the cohesiveness of their communities, and their attachments to traditional lifestyles and values make them less open to change, less inclined to accommodate to mainstream culture.

Related to the isolation of the mountains is another myth believed by millions of Americans: that in Appalachia time has moved slowly since emigrants landed in Atlantic ports in the 1700s and began moving to the hills. Archaic speechways persisting down to the present, along with traditional ballads, Jack tales, folk dancing, weaving, and other traditions often traceable to Renaissance England and Scotland, might seem perfect examples of cultural preservations intact from centuries past. Yet any study of these traditions reveals that they are living and dynamic and regularly produce, for example, ballads that recount modern tragedies, disasters, and tales of star-crossed love.

The “Shakespearean myth” was formulated and promoted by people from outside the mountains who, coming to know mountain people firsthand, were intent to identify their positive qualities. However, this idea withstands little objective scrutiny. Its supporters cite only a few items for an assertion about mountain speech as a whole and rarely cite parallels from Renaissance-era authors. Terms cited as Shakespearean are (or until recently were) found in many parts of North America and the British Isles, such as
afeard
(“afraid”;
Midsummer's Night Dream
, act 3, scene 1, line 25: “Will not the ladies be
afeard
of the lion?”) and
learn
(“teach”;
Romeo and Juliet
, act 3, scene 2, line 12:
“Learn
me how to lose a winning match”). Because Shakespeare and Elizabeth I died more than a century before settlers came to Appalachia, it is unclear how their English was preserved over the intervening generations. Thus, Shakespeare's speech came to Appalachia indirectly, if it came at all, and it is no wonder that American scholars have spent little time assessing how “Elizabethan” Appalachian speech is. Outside the scholarly world, however, this and related ideas have flourished as cultural myths, improbable as they may be in the modern world. Why? Because even though Appalachia has been neglected, marginalized, and in many ways exploited, the region retains immense significance for countless Americans who lack cultural bearings and cultural memory—who lack roots. Within the region solidarity keeps pressure strong to maintain local speech, much of which seems almost immune to the quixotic efforts of schoolteachers to modify it. Because local speech is integral to people's heritage and identity in the mountains, it will continue to thrive.

If Appalachia is a perceived region, one expects to find usages that function as markers of identity and solidarity there, shibboleths that distinguish
insiders from outsiders and from insiders who identify with outsiders. One candidate is the pronunciation of
Appalachian
with the third syllable as
latch
rather than
lay.
This development, which has grown steadily since the 1960s, reflects a regional consciousness and a reaction to the pronunciation of the media and government representatives such as War on Poverty workers. It illustrates the continuing tension between those who identify as being from the region and others.
³⁷

No one of the five perspectives is adequate to understand the many roles English has played in the life and history of Appalachia and its people. It cannot be defined by considering only its geography or history, its linguistic elements, or the social and cultural contexts in which it is found. Linguists have often referred to “Appalachian English” in a loose, descriptive way, but they do not accept that a single dialect exists in the region or that the language there differs radically from elsewhere. Mountain speech may often be thought to be the most distinctly regional variety in America, but few of its forms, even relic ones, are unique there. What Appalachia shares with the South in general is far more extensive that what it does not, so Appalachian English can be defined only to a certain extent on the basis of geography. Research has shown how mixed its ancestry is and that in many ways Appalachian English represents a microcosm of American English, so a historical perspective can bring us only so close to defining it as well. Linguistically speaking, Appalachian English is best characterized in terms of the higher frequency and the combination of forms used. Like other American varieties, it is likely to continue evolving in some respects toward dominant national patterns because of pressures that are standardizing American culture. But mountain English will persist because its speakers use certain of its features, some archaic and some innovative, to provide the cultural cohesion and continuity that binds them together and to give themselves a meaningful social and regional identity, even in the face of misunderstanding and pressure to conform.

NOTES

The author is grateful to many colleagues with whom he has had profitable conversations about Appalachian English over the years. Most notably these include Bridget Anderson, Linda Blanton, Clare Dannenberg, Bethany K. Dumas, Anita Puckett, and Walt Wolfram.