“I’ve not never heard of that”*…
This website [is] devoted to the speech of one of the country’s most interesting but most often misunderstood regions—southern and central Appalachia, which stretches from north Georgia to West Virginia. Some have romanticized the English spoken there as the language of Shakespeare and admired its authenticity and inventiveness. Others have scorned or dismissed it as uneducated, bad grammar, or worse. Too rarely has it been appreciated for what it is—the native speech of millions of Americans that has a distinguished history and that makes Appalachia what it is just as the region’s extraordinary music does.
Appalachian English is an umbrella term referring to the social and geographical varieties found in a large mountain and valley region encompassing all or parts of eight southern states: West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, western Virginia and North Carolina, northern Georgia and Alabama, and northwestern South Carolina. Historically and structurally it is closely related to Ozark English, and it shares many features with varieties of English spoken in the Deep South.
At this site you’ll find a wealth of information and resources. There’s enjoyment to be had in exploring, but if you’re looking for a site that’s just for entertainment or one with funny spellings, you’ve come to the wrong place. Too many of them are around already. As two natives of East Tennessee who have heard hill speech for a long time and have written about it, we have designed this site to present not only how Aplapachian people talk, but also some of the history and the flavor of that talk. It focuses especially on the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, but the speech of the Smokies is typical of much of what you’ll hear elsewhere in the region, though not as strongly as a couple of generations back.
At a professional conference some years ago, one of us on our bus tour happened to sit next to a linguist from the University of California (who is now at an Ivy League school). He asked me what my special interest was, and I said, “Appalachian English.” He responded, “Oh, Appalachian English is one of my favorite dialects. Does anyone still speak it?” The question sort of took me aback, but I looked at him for a moment and replied, “Yes, I’d say about twenty million people do.” He seemed a bit confused, so I explained that plenty of people from the region actually choose to talk the way they do and that their distinctive English is probably here to stay. Their speech helps define who they are, whether they live in Kentucky or have moved to Detroit to work in a plant. He looked out the window…
Explore Appalachian English— and be sure to take the vocabulary quiz.
* an exemplary Appalachian English sentence
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As we head for the hills, we might send free-thinking birthday greetings to Henri Bergson; he was born on this date in 1859. A philosopher especially influential in the first half of the 20th Century, Bergson convinced many of the primacy of immediate experience and intuition over rationalism and science for the understanding reality…. many, but not the likes of Wittgenstein, Russell, Moore, and Santayana, who thought that he willfully misunderstood the scientific method in order to justify his “projection of subjectivity onto the physical world.” Still, in 1927 Bergson won the Nobel Prize (in Literature); and in 1930, received France’s highest honor, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d’honneur.
Bergson’s influence waned mightily later in the century. To the extent that there’s been a bit of a resurgence of interest, it’s largely the result of Gilles Deleuze’s appropriation of Bergson’s concept of “mulitplicity” and his treatment of duration, which Deleuze used in his critique of Hegel’s dialectic.
