Talking Appalachian Page 4
25. Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schillings-Estes, American English, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 2.
26. Carver, American Regional Dialects; Wolfram and Schillings-Estes, American English.
27. The official borders of the Appalachian region, according to the Appalachian Regional Commission, extend far beyond the areas delineated on our map, which includes only the general dialect regions referenced by the studies and works in this volume.
28. Walt Wolfram, “Sociolinguistic Assumptions, Labels, and Change,” Appalachian Journal 11 (1984): 215–24.
29. Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson, “Language in the South,” in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, vol. 5, Language, ed. Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
30. Wolfram, “Sociolinguistic Assumptions.”
31. Wolfram and Schillings-Estes, American English, 318–19.
32. Sohn, Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women, 37.
33. Linda Scott DeRosier, Creeker: A Woman’s Journey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 63.
34. Ibid., 58.
Part I
Varieties, Education, and Power in Appalachia
The Historical Background and Nature of the Englishes of Appalachia
Michael Montgomery
The historical background of the English language in Appalachia and its ongoing change reveal a heritage shared across the region in many ways today. Yet at the same time these fundamental realities fully justify the plural designation Appalachian Englishes, to indicate its diversity. The overarching label Appalachian can be useful to make qualified generalizations about speech and many other things, to suggest commonalities between places that are distant on the map, or to identify affinities that people in the mountain states of the eastern United States share. However, in practice, local or subregional identities rank first and trump the broad one of Appalachian on the ground.1 Ask me where I’m from, and as a reflex I say, “East Tennessee.” While in Abingdon a few years ago, people adamantly told me that they were from “southwest Virginia” (leaving me no doubt where they were from). There are good reasons to believe that localness has long been primary to people, especially those of European extraction whose families have been in the same area of Appalachia for up to three centuries. If this is so, can one talk about “Appalachia” at all?
Yes, but only with care. Appalachia is a place as well as places, people as well as peoples. The more closely one examines the region, the more complex it becomes. The features and usages of its English are shared not only across many states but also with areas farther afield, such as the Ozarks or even Texas.2 Equally, there is immense variation from place to place and from one community of practice to another; for example, compare the English of a group of quilters with that of a group of NASCAR fans. No matter how small the place, there are social differences in the use of English within it—there probably always have been and will be. Admonitions to younger people “not to get above their raising” (i.e., their elders) in the way they talk and behave are nothing new, yet they cannot prevent differences between generations from being the most prevalent of all, especially in terms of vocabulary.
This essay discusses how we can talk about Appalachian Englishes in the realm of history, especially with regard to settlement and migration in the region. Here the eighteenth century is the most crucial time, for the region was gradually populated by Europeans from about 1730 (south-central Pennsylvania) to the 1830s (north Georgia).3 If one were to choose a label for relic usages lingering in the region in the late twentieth century (e.g., holp ‘helped’ or waiter ‘wedding attendant’), the best one would be “colonial” or “eighteenth century.” This colonial heritage may come as a surprise to the many Americans who have heard that “Elizabethan” or “Shakespearean” English is (or was, until not long ago) spoken somewhere in the mountains and that the region’s linguistic ancestry can be traced back that far—four centuries or more.4 However, historians and other researchers have shown that such is the case for language and many other facets of culture. The history of settlement and migration points to the primary importance of Pennsylvania and the secondary importance of the Lower South. As we will see, arguments that mountain English is Elizabethan falter on several grounds, including an implausible explanation of how it could have gotten to Appalachia.
The foundational migration of Europeans into Appalachia occurred in a widening corridor from central Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley westward to Pittsburgh and the Ohio Valley and southwestward into Virginia during the eighteenth century. The storied movements into Virginia, predominantly (but far from exclusively) by Germans and Scotch-Irish (from Ulster),5 have been frequently recounted since at least Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West more than a century ago: how many of these settlers followed the Shenandoah River and its forks, traveled along the Great Wagon Road into and through the Valley of Virginia, and followed the Great Valley of the Tennessee into North Carolina (i.e., into what would become the state of Tennessee), while others trekked through the Cumberland Gap, into what would become Kentucky.6 This narrative of migration and settlement was incorporated by renowned historian Frederick Jackson Turner into his Frontier Thesis, which represented the largest truly American epic to his time.7 Players in this drama of “conquering” the frontier included the larger-than-life Daniel Boone and the Overmountain Men, who in lightning fashion descended from the valley of the Holston and Clinch to defeat Loyalist forces at King’s Mountain, South Carolina, on October 7, 1780, an engagement that turned the tide of the Revolutionary War and led to British capitulation the following summer. Such figures and compatriots left behind oral accounts, correspondence, and incipient legends used by later researchers to reconstruct the period. Interestingly, it is due largely to the efforts of one individual that these stories and documents were gathered and preserved for posterity. Lyman Copeland Draper (1815–1891) from upstate New York was the indefatigable librarian who scoured the interior of the country beginning in the 1830s to collect and copy thousands of pages still in private hands and transcribe reminiscences that would become essential building blocks for later historians.
The backdrop just sketched provides some order to our discussion, but the settling and history of the Appalachian region—and the planting and development of its Englishes—requires a weaving back and forth chronologically as well as time exposures of specific places. Generalizations about history, language, or anything else are surely desirable, but they must always be assessed for mistaken impressions, assumptions, and gaps. For example, it is a fact that the arduousness of overland travel before the advent of modern roads prevented many in Appalachia from contact with mainstream society, but describing the region as a whole as “isolated” (as many, including linguists, have done) is misleading at best.8 Such a description may have some validity for individual communities, but it would involve specific people usually having a specific ancestry, specific contact with outsiders, and certain psychological and economic traits. The caveat about judging a community to be isolated based on the difficulty of access is nowhere better illustrated than in the seemingly less accessible coal mining areas of Kentucky and West Virginia, where eastern and central Europeans as well as African Americans settled and then often left in the early twentieth century.9 It is well known that language has a life of its own and is always subject to change. Given this reality, the purported isolation of localities should logically produce increasing differences in speech rather than uniformity. Ironically, however, many linguists and social scientists have often applied the all-encompassing label “Appalachian” to research conducted in a single small area, thereby considering it typical, whether this is acknowledged or not. Small differences in language (or the belief in their existence) are so much a part of local identity that people not uncommonly claim that they can distinguish residents of communities five miles apart by their speech or that they can tell just by hearing someone talk whether that person is from their own neck of the woods. Such claims involve tiny details of rhythm and intonation that others cannot detect, and though they may not be demonstrable or testable, they are nevertheless believed because they are part of what defines localness.
Another element of local identity is consciousness of local history and topography, both of which are important to linguists tracing how people migrate and how language varies and changes. For example, from time to time one finds it stated that people from the east and north, including those following the routes outlined earlier, migrated into or settled the “Appalachian Mountains” or even “migrated down the ridges of Appalachia.” In truth, the paths were nearly always valleys. People followed watercourses and constructed farmsteads, forts, stockades, and other buildings usually adjacent to them or to bluffs along them. They built stores, churches, and inns near water and whatever roads existed. However inconstant the tides and navigation might be, rivers and streams often surpassed roads as a means of travel. Settlements formed at the forks of streams and rivers, and some of them grew in time into towns and then cities (Knoxville, Pittsburgh). Settlers eyed stable homesteads and the most productive land they could make their own; they knew farms would be poorer and less tenable in higher elevations. Assessment of the land’s fertility led many to skirt eastern Kentucky in favor of the Bluegrass. It prompted a vanguard of Virginians and North Carolinians to found Nashville in 1780, several years before Knoxville. The latter was a more secure and, for a time, more substantial settlement, but one with a less fertile hinterland. This tendency was often replicated elsewhere, and the interplay of valley and ridge became what is still a constant. Outside of county seats and other towns, communities in much of the region were often loose and highly dispersed, bearing scarce resemblance to villages elsewhere in early America. In much of Appalachia, uplands were settled a generation after the bottomlands as the population grew and spread. In the higher or more rural areas of Appalachia, communities were called settlements well into the twentieth century. Even so, that term is misleading, because migration and population fluidity have also been constants. It was through southern Appalachia that much of the southern half of the country was populated, ultimately all the way to California.
Although the English language called Appalachian is often believed to be the most distinctively regional variety in America and is often referred to as if it were a single homogeneous entity, the region does not have just a single dialect. The population’s ancestry is quite mixed, and in many ways, the English of Appalachia represents a microcosm of American English; its speakers have both preserved forms that are no longer used in most of the rest of the country and innovations of others. Educator and social researcher John C. Campbell’s famous observation in 1921 about Appalachia being “a land . . . about which, perhaps, more things are known that are not true than of any part of our country,” pertains particularly well to the English spoken there.10
The speech of Appalachia has captivated journalists, travelers, and educators for the better part of two centuries. One early commentator was Anne Royall (1769–1851), the most famous, if not also the most reviled, female journalist of her time (she was tried and convicted of being a “public nuisance” and a “common scold”). About the speech of her Monroe County, Virginia (now West Virginia), neighbors, she wrote in 1826: “Their favorite word of all, is hate, by which they mean the word thing; for instance, nothing, ‘not a hate—not waun hate will ye’s do.’ What did you buy at the store, ladies? ‘Not a hate—well you hav’nt a thing here to eat.’ . . . When they would say pretense, they say lettinon, which is a word of very extensive use among them. It signifies a jest, and is used to express disapprobation and surprise; ‘you are just lettinon to rob them spoons—Polly is not mad, she is only lettinon.’”11 From antebellum times until well into the twentieth century, the region’s speech was known primarily through writers of fiction, such as backwoods humorist George Washington Harris (1814–1869) and prolific novelist Mary Noailles Murfree (1850–1922), who wrote under the name Charles Egbert Craddock. They and countless other writers of popular fiction employed contorted spellings to stress the exoticness of local speech and enhance their portrayals of illiterate, dialect-speaking characters. “Thar’s nun ove ’em fas’ enuf tu ketch me, nither is thar hosses,” Harris has his narrator, Sut Lovingood, boast, using a form of English that is almost too difficult to read because of its “eye dialect” (spellings like ove and tu that represent common pronunciations and are solely for the sake of appearance).12 Many such forms were later stamped into public images of hill-country English through the Barney Google and Snuffy Smith comic strip, launched in 1919 and still running in some newspapers today. Its creator Billy DeBeck borrowed heavily from his copy of Harris’s book.13 Since that time, countless books, movies, television programs, and tourist-shop caricatures have reinforced the popular but erroneous belief that such usages as plumb ‘completely’ (as in “he fell plumb to the bottom”) and right smart ‘good deal’ (as in “they lost a right smart in that trade”), among others, are found only in mountain speech. It’s not hard to see why misconceptions, myths, and misinformed stereotypes about the region and its speakers abound.
Study of and commentary on mountain speech by educators, scholars, and linguists began in the late nineteenth century and continue to the present day. We can group these efforts into two general categories: those based on an individual’s observations, and those based on a survey or project of some kind. Each is valuable in its own way. The observations of an individual (e.g., Josiah Combs of Knott County, Kentucky), made at close hand and over a lifetime, can identify many terms that no survey ever can. Reference works like the Dictionary of American Regional English rely heavily on both types.
Individual Accounts
The idea that American English is markedly conservative and preserves forms no longer used in the British Isles has found expression with respect to American English generally and to specific varieties of it. When commentators identify items from more geographically or socially “isolated” speech varieties that are also known from seventeenth-century or earlier English literature, they are apt to label them “Elizabethan” or “Chaucerian.” Because that literature (including the King James Bible) was long an integral part of American education, it served as the natural, immediate point of comparison. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was commonly held that exported (or transplanted) language as found in a colony often displayed an arrested development when compared with that of the mother country.14 That the English of Appalachia was four or more centuries old became the most prevalent version of this idea. Dozens of articles claiming Elizabethan, Shakespearean, or Chaucerian holdovers in the southern mountains have appeared since 1889, when a Vanderbilt University professor cited items in Tennessee speech with identical parallels in Shakespeare (e.g., handkercher ‘handkerchief’, as in King John, act IV, scene I, line 42: “I knit my handkercher about your brows”).15 William Goodell Frost, president of a small Appalachian college in Kentucky, was most responsible for propagating and establishing the idea that mountain speech and culture were legitimate survivals from older times, and he took issue with the prevailing view that these were degenerations:
The rude language of the mountains is far less a degradation than a survival. The Saxon pronoun “hit” holds its place almost universally. Strong past tenses, “holp” for helped, “drug” for dragged, and the like, are heard constantly; and the syllabic plural is retained in words in -st and others. The greeting as we ride up to a cabin is “Howdy, strangers. ’Light and hitch your beastes.” Quite a vocabulary of Chaucer’s words which have been dropped by polite lips, but which linger in these solitudes, has been made out by some of our students. “Pack” for carry, “gorm” for muss, “feisty” for full of life, impertinent, are examples.16
Such accounts not only claim Shakespeare and his contemporaries as precedents but also occasionally reach back to the Old English of a millennium ago (ax ‘ask’ and Frost’s hit ‘it’, both of which continue to linger in pockets of Appalachia). Initially, it was outsiders who labeled the speech of mountaineers as Elizabethan; more recently, some in the region have adopted the label to ascribe status to their speech. The idea has taken on a life of its own and become a hardy myth in American culture, part of a popular view that the southern mountains have remained static in time and that their people have maintained a cultural repository of balladry and other music, story cycles (e.g., Jack tales), dance, quilting, and other traditions. One cannot understate the contribution of research-based studies demonstrating the survival in North America—most often in Appalachia—of practices, lore, and traditions now largely or completely extinct in the British Isles. The work of Cecil Sharp, Olive Dame Campbell, and Maud Karpeles on Child ballads is only the most outstanding example.17 But problems and inaccuracies easily arise when comparisons are based on poor or nonexistent historical documentation or when presumptions are based on superficial similarities—such as connecting Appalachian clog dancing, a twentieth-century development, with Irish step dancing—or when time periods or geographic locations are merged or other details are treated loosely.
Pride, romanticism, and a desire for cultural validation through associating local speech with prestigious writers and King James English are what underlie most claims about the speaking of Elizabethan or older English in Appalachia. Proponents of this idea are usually interested in perceptions and ideology rather than being overly concerned with issues of documentation. A few years ago, Knoxville congressman John Duncan Jr. wrote a defense of his local accent, affirming, “I am proud to be from East Tennessee, and, even though I may be teased, I will just relax and keep speaking ‘authentic Chaucer English’” (but citing no allegedly Chaucerian usages).18 Being considered a cultural repository has helped inhabitants of the Appalachians define themselves in an affirmative way. However, advocates seldom quote or reference the sources allegedly used (Frost does not). Rarely do they relate similarities in language to settlement and migration history or attend to issues of time sequencing. Shakespeare and Elizabeth I lived 400 years ago, generations before English speakers came to the mountains, and it is unknown how closely the English of those speakers approximated the literary English of their day. Almost never are any communities in the United States named where such archaic speech can be found. Still, it is important not to dismiss arguments for an Elizabethan heritage of Appalachian speech without seeing whether one can make the connection. In this regard, the work of one scholar stands far above all others and ranks as the definitive version of the Elizabethan case: that of Josiah Combs (1888–1960). His work has been almost entirely neglected, yet he has arguably pursued the case most diligently in articles published in 1916 and 1931.19 Perhaps his reputation suffered because he accompanied claims of linguistic inheritance with ones that mountain natives were racially pure: “the Southern mountaineers are the conservators of Old, Early, and Elizabethan English in the New World. These four million mountaineers . . . form the body of what is perhaps the purest Old English blood to be found among English-speaking peoples.”20 Unlike other commentators, Combs did not make this statement out of blind ideology or prejudice, for he based it on a study of eastern Kentucky surnames.21 Methodologies of evaluating the ancestry of surnames were undeveloped in Combs’s day, but he did not hesitate to declare that all but a fraction of the relevant names were English, apart from a few that began with Mc-, which he took to indicate Scottish ancestry. He demonstrated that he was an extraordinary observer of his eastern Kentucky English, that he read English Renaissance literature widely and closely, and that he could cite it in case after case.