Talking Appalachian
Talking Appalachian
TALKING APPALACHIAN
Voice, Identity, and Community
Edited by
Amy D. Clark
and
Nancy M. Hayward
Copyright © 2013 by The University Press of Kentucky
Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Talking Appalachian : voice, Identity, And Community / Edited by Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8131-4096-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4097-1 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8131-4158-9 (pdf)
1. English language—Dialects—Appalachian Region. 2. English language—Variation—United States. 3. Americanisms—Appalachian Region. 4. Appalachian Region—Languages. I. Clark, Amy (Amy D.) editor of compilation. II. Hayward, Nancy M., 1945-editor of compilation.
PE2970.A6T35 2013
427’.974—dc23 2012045878
This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.
Manufactured in the United States of America.
Member of the Association of American University Presses
Contents
Preface
Introduction
Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward
Part I: Varieties, Education, and Power in Appalachia
The Historical Background and Nature of the Englishes of Appalachia
Michael Montgomery
The Appalachian Range: The Limits of Language Variation in West Virginia
Kirk Hazen, Jaime Flesher, and Erin Simmons
Think Locally: Language as Community Practice
Nancy M. Hayward
African American Speech in Southern Appalachia
Walt Wolfram
Dialect and Education in Appalachia
Jeffrey Reaser
Voices in the Appalachian Classroom
Amy D. Clark
Silence, Voice, and Identity among Appalachian College Women
Katherine Sohn
Language and Power
Anita Puckett
The Treatment of Dialect in Appalachian Literature
Michael Ellis
Part II: Voices from Appalachia
Personal Essays
Voiceplace
George Ella Lyon
In My Own Country
Silas House
Southern Exposure
Lee Smith
A Matter of Perception
Jane Hicks
Novel Excerpts
Carrie Bishop: From Storming Heaven
Denise Giardina
The High Sheriff: From One Foot in Eden
Ron Rash
Ezra’s Journal and Andrew Nettles: From Hiding Ezra
Rita Quillen
Short Story
Holler
Crystal Wilkinson
Poetry
Spell Check
Anne Shelby
Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Permissions
Index
Preface
As editors, we came to this book with personal histories in Appalachia and keen interests in language. To clarify why we are so passionate about this topic, we offer our stories.
Amy D. Clark
I grew up in the far southwestern corner of Virginia in what might be called the heart of Appalachia, a part of the state that converges with eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, and southern West Virginia. Born to teenage parents, I was a fourth living generation in a family of front porch storytellers, so numerous linguistic heirlooms were passed on to me over the years.
My great-grandmother (whom we called “Mamaw”) sparked my interest in the history of Appalachian Englishes. I grew up just a mile from her farm in Jonesville, Virginia. She referred to a bedspread as a “counterpane” and the peacocks that clattered on the roof of her house and in the surrounding woods as “pea-fowls.” She talked about what she “commenced to” do that day and warned us that we would “feel right common” the next morning if we ate too many green apples. She and my great-grandfather told stories about “haints” that had—at certain points in their pasts—revealed themselves up and down the “holler” where they lived. While growing up, I attributed the different kind of English they spoke to their ages; I thought it was just the way older people from the hills talked. But I also remember how Mamaw described our ancestors, a strange breed originally from Scotland. It would be years later, when I returned to her recorded voice and heard the melody in her vocabulary and grammar and the way she pronounced her words that I would begin to link her version of English to the place we call home and to my own language patterns.
Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, I watched enough television to see and hear the cultural demarcation between mainstream America and my region, particularly in the way people in my family and in my community spoke. I loved to read, but I was never introduced to Appalachian literature in my high school English classes, where I might have recognized my home voice in that of the characters. Our curriculum did not include classes that invited discussions of Appalachian issues or culture, so I did not identify as an Appalachian, nor did I understand that I spoke a particular regional dialect. Because I devoured so much literature, I had tacit knowledge of the rules of standard American English (SAE) and honed the skill of code-switching from an early age; I could turn off my dialect when I wanted to, but it was always at the risk of teasing from friends and family who believed that SAE was for people who thought they were too good to be associated with our neck of the woods.
A class at Clinch Valley College (renamed the University of Virginia’s College at Wise in 1999) changed all that. The class, called Appalachian Prose and Poetry, introduced me to James Still, Lee Smith, Mary Lee Settle, Harriette Simpson Arnow, and many others. Their characters’ voices mirrored my own. I remember feeling so proud when I realized that my culture was worthy of study, that an entire field was dedicated to my homeplace, people, and culture.
As my research project for the course, I began working on an oral history of my great-grandmother’s life. I spent hours transcribing stories that I had heard growing up, but for the first time I was actually listening to the poetry of her dialect: the rhythm in her accent, the expressions as colorful and musty as old-timey clothing in a trunk, the creative syntax of her sentences. I realized that my entire life had been an education in Appalachian studies, that there were people who wanted to read about the kinds of stories I had listened to over and over again, and that my vernacular dialect—my home voice—would be invited into that discussion. It was a watershed moment in owning my identity as an Appalachian.
As an educator in central Appalachia, I work to cultivate an understanding and appreciation of the region’s dialectal diversity, particularly for students who may face well-meaning but misguided ideologies about vernacular dialects in the classroom. In my view, referring to a student’
s vernacular speech or writing as “bad grammar” denigrates her family, her community, and her culture. In contrast, teaching a student about the origins, linguistic structure, and rich literature associated with her “voiceplace” may have far-reaching benefits in how she perceives herself as well as the place she calls home. For many of us who speak the dialects described in this book, our speech is home, so how we choose to name and talk about it matters. Most speakers like me know very little about their linguistic histories or why they speak the way they do because discussions of dialects are rarely a part of general educational curriculums. The result is a gulf between what we believe about our speech and the true influences that pepper our dialectal patterns. For me, this book represents a bridging of that gulf.
Nancy M. Hayward
My mother, and her family before her, came from western Virginia. I was born into a small coal mining community, and although I lived there only a short time, my sense of self resonates with that part of the country. Perhaps that’s because some of my earliest—and best—memories were created while listening to the sounds of my mother’s people. Their storytelling was richly interwoven with their identities of belonging to that place, in that time, and in that community.
Now, as an academic, I recognize that my interest in language was nurtured during the summers I spent in Virginia. My curiosity about how languages are affiliated with place and identity has driven my work. Studying—and then teaching—sociolinguistics clarified why my mother never lost any of her original pronunciations or the particular cadence of her speech: her identity was entangled in her love of Virginia. Even though she lived in the Northeast for most of her adult life, she was never of that place.
Unlike Amy, I can’t credit my interest in Appalachian Englishes to rich lived experiences. My academic pursuits introduced me to the issues embodied in this book. However, having lived in southwestern Pennsylvania for thirty years, I now recognize that the people of this place have struggled with many of the same issues as the rest of Appalachia: the economic downturns of coal mining, the destruction of beautiful mountainscapes, and the stigma of being from a place called “Pennsyltucky.”
A Final Note
Given the complexity of the subject, this volume cannot possibly cover all aspects of the region’s rich and diverse range of dialects, but we believe it is a first step toward assembling the scholars and creative writers who best know the varieties of Appalachian English. We anticipate a growing interest in Appalachia’s linguistic diversity and expect that the topics in this work will continue to evolve—and expand—as other voices join the conversation.
Introduction
Amy D. Clark and Nancy M. Hayward
To every person who has asked us why Appalachians sound like hillbillies, to every teacher who corrected us for taking our home voices to school, and to every misguided individual who has described Appalachian speech varieties as “bad,” “incorrect,” or “improper,” this book is our response.
Like the borders of Appalachia, its dialects are difficult to define, and the boundaries of where language “appropriateness” begins and ends are blurred by politics. Bad grammar, hillbonics, hick, comfortable tongue, nonstandard English, briar, countrified, and Shakespearean are value-laden descriptors of Appalachian speech that may lead to emotional reactions. The way people clash over language variations, their origins, their significance for speakers, and where they rank in the linguistic hierarchy of American Englishes begs for the conversation in these pages.
Appalachia is generally considered the region that follows the Appalachian mountain chain in the eastern United States. The name suggests a type of geographic core distinguishing it from the rest of the United States; however, Appalachia’s boundaries, drawn and redrawn since the seventeenth century, are chiefly political.1 The Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC), established in 1965, developed what may be the most widely accepted map of Appalachia, although its inclusion of southern New York and parts of Mississippi while excluding sections of Virginia is a matter of contention.2 Nevertheless, Appalachia is both a real place to those who live there and a sometimes mythic land to outsiders. For inhabitants, what it means to live in Appalachia and how they identify themselves varies from person to person, just as what it means to be an American is a matter of individual experience. For those who live outside the region, Appalachia and its people are likely defined by maps or media—sometimes romanticized, and sometimes stigmatized. Whatever Appalachia means to the reader, this book explores the inextricable link between place (both real and psychological) and language, resulting in what Appalachian author George Ella Lyon calls “voiceplace,” or the “first voice [that is] tuned by the people and place that made [us]” (see part II).
Traditionally, constructions of Appalachia have cast it as an essentialized geographic location—that is, either you’re Appalachian or you’re not. Yet readers of this book already know that there are many manifestations of Appalachia, just as there are many Appalachian Englishes. In truth, some of these manifestations may be due to a particular geographic location along the Appalachian mountain chain. But many more are probably due to social interactions and, moreover, the identities that speakers project within those social interactions. As Bonnie Norton points out, “linguistic communities are not homogeneous and consensual”;3 they are localized and contextualized. In other words, within any broad geographic region—in this case, Appalachia—there are microcommunities where speakers enact their social identities through language. So in this book we take a broadly sociolinguistic approach and explore what it means to be an Appalachian speaker across many social environments and in many unique communities and communities of practice.
We begin our discussion by deconstructing the concept of “Appalachian English.” It is important to note that this book’s perspective encourages the contextualization of Appalachian Englishes within what can best be described as shifting boundaries and perceptions. In his book Appalachia, John Williams states that the modernist definition of Appalachia tends to rely on environmental, cultural, or socioeconomic markers that are chiefly “political” and therefore arbitrary. He suggests a postmodern approach whereby Appalachia is seen as “a zone of interaction among the diverse peoples who have lived in or acted upon it, as it is also of their interactions with the region’s complex environment.”4 Although boundaries and definitions remain problematic, we accept Williams’s theoretical frame as we discuss the variations of English spoken and written by those who live in Appalachia. The territory covered in this book is not representative of the ARC’s map of “Official Appalachia”; however, the ARC version includes much of the territory discussed here, from western Pennsylvania to northern Georgia.
What to call the dialects discussed in this book presents a similar complication, particularly because we are talking about a place where the very pronunciation of Appalachia and how one refers to the Appalachian parts of the region’s states are cultural markers and sometimes matters of debate.5 We have worked to avoid a sweeping characterization of the region’s dialects, recognizing that dialects do not observe political or geographic boundaries; factors such as migration and settlement patterns over the years counter any claim that there is a general Appalachian person who speaks a general Appalachian language.
Talking Appalachian is cast in a region of “stunning natural and cultural extremes” that is overshadowed by an “image problem” affecting language perception.6 Jeff Biggers describes four images of Appalachia that persist: “pristine Appalachia, the unspoiled mountains and hills along the Appalachian Trail . . . backwater Appalachia, home of the ‘strange land and peculiar people’ in thousands of stories, novels, radio, and TV programs and films . . . Anglo-Saxon Appalachia, once defined by Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary as a mountain region of ‘white natives’ despite its role as a crossroads of indigenous cultures and vast immigrant and African American migrations for centuries; and pitiful Appalachia, the poster region of welfare and privation.”
7
Many of us who research and write about Appalachia know that it is time to move on from the polarizing effects of stereotype and to explore the region’s positive traits rather than dwell on its scars. But while it may no longer be politically correct to use the word hillbilly in “mixed” company, linguistic prejudice is still openly practiced—even encouraged—against varieties of Appalachian English and those who speak them. And Appalachians are not the only marginalized groups to face this problem.
We know about the suppression and attempted eradication of American Indian languages and their dialects in the mid-1800s. These programs were enforced by U.S. government officials who believed that civilization would surely follow if “schools should be established, which children should be required to attend; their barbarous dialect should be blotted out and the English language substituted.”8 African American dialects have also long been denigrated; the Oakland, California, Ebonics (also known as African American Vernacular English, or AAVE) controversy of 1996 cast a spotlight on racist attitudes about educational curriculums that support the vernacular dialects of minority students.9 Likewise, speakers of Latino dialects have experienced “seclusion and silencing” through “punitive measures” not just in educational institutions but also in communities and families that “continue to silence, exclude and disempower” those who speak anything other than standardized English.10 As a final example of linguistic prejudice, we need only look at the current English-only movement in the United States to witness the attitudes of many toward Spanish-speaking residents. The English-only discussions—though cloaked in practical and legal issues—represent a resistance to servicing brown-skinned speakers of second languages, especially students.
Despite a shared linguistic prejudice, Appalachians do not generally share a recognized ethnicity, although there are those who make the case for such recognition. Victor Villanueva, in his foreword to Katherine Sohn’s book Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia (see also Sohn’s essay in part I), says that Appalachians personify every color. (How true, in that many of us could be—and are—American Indian, Turkish, Portuguese, African American, or Hispanic.) “Appalachian is a color,” Villanueva says, “if not recognized as such.” Appalachians’ color exists, he says, in the prejudices based purely on appearances, behaviors, and dialects, “bigotries that cannot be readily discarded through class ascension.” At least “folks of color always have ‘color’ as part of the victory” when they climb from the lower classes, Villanueva writes.11 Appalachia’s reputation for being generally white and lower class is a plausible reason why the region’s dialects are still openly ridiculed in just about every aspect of society, particularly mainstream media, without fear of recrimination. While there has been much discussion of dialects “by and about people of color,” Villanueva writes, “discussion concerning Appalachia has been scarce.”12