Appalachian Dialect

on Wednesday, August 29, 2012
So many people outside the mountains (foreigners, if you will) associate the accent and grammar of the Appalachian speech with a lack of education, poverty, and bare feet and beer guts. That is simply the way the media has molded them, and it has molded us all as well. We begin to think our native dialect will hold us back in life. As a result, we drop it around those foreigners, adopting the accent most commonly used on TV, which is a total non-accent.
In consequence, we are losing that wonderful, rich vocabulary and unique patterns of speech in the cities here. Living in Morgantown, I know that no one around here speaks the full dialect. Even my grandparents, who worked blue collar jobs and lived in a way that was extinct in the rest of the country, sound mostly “normal.” Even so, as a young child, I was embarrassed by how they spoke. Now, I’m glad they still talk like that. It’s special here. No one at school says “worshcloth” for washcloth, or “Boosh” for former president Bush. No one else lives in a “holler,” or can rhyme “fire,” “tire,” and “wire” with “jar” (so that a tire shop becomes a tar shop).
These are quirks that maybe don’t present us in the best light, due to media-enforced stereotypes, but they are a part of us. Just because we live in a holler doesn’t make us less intelligent. Appalachian English has roots in some of the oldest forms of English. It may not be the Queen’s English, but it’s still special.
-M


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