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Restoring Appalachian Roots

12/21/2013

23 Comments

 
I am from Appalachia. I was away from it for long decades, but I am immersed in it again. And what I have come to realize is how much I appreciate the mountain language I no longer speak, but happily still can understand.

After college, I went to graduate school in the Midwest, and then lived in Alaska, California, Colorado and other TV-commentator-accent locales. I moved to those places after college, but that was not when I lost my language. That actually took place while I was in college, a college that sat in Kentucky but not truly in Appalachia. When I was in college, I decided (with some pretty good evidence) that most of the world equated a southern or Appalachian accent with stupidity. Since I was not stupid (on any test you might want to name, I would have outscored a lot of those who took the “stupid” position), and since my ego didn’t care for being thought stupid, I made a determined effort to move my birthplace linguistically, so as not to be assigned to the stupid class based only on accent. By the time I had finished that effort (about six months), I had gone so far overboard that I apparently moved linguistically to England; I sounded faintly upper-class British, with wonderful enunciation and preciseness, and was sometimes mistaken for a Brit.

Sometime after that, as I scoped other parts of the country, I began to overcome my ego, and my speech  mellowed into standard American with just traces of something that people would comment on favorably and ask about. Appalachia never did come back, but people would vaguely peg me as a Virginian (my birthplace) or perhaps from somewhere in the south.

About ten years ago, I resumed living in Appalachia for a good fraction of each year, among Appalachians who never left and who somehow escaped pollution by TV-speak, and became bathed in my mother tongue again. I find it wonderful. Some of its character depends on pronunciation, and some of it on its wonderful expressions, but the sum total forms a pattern you hear nowhere else. Yesterday, we were talking to a local official, and he added an “h” to the word “it.” To be clear, he said something along the lines of, “Hit’s a good thing…” That’s not a pronunciation that you hear everywhere. Of course, I heard it growing up, but not in all the years I was away. Now I hear it again, and I like it instead of deploring it. Let me say up front: the official is not stupid. He has, I am sure, a college degree. His children have advanced degrees. He is successful and they are successful. But he is Appalachian, and he pronounces the word “it” as “hit.” And good for him. I have done a 180 from the days when I tried to lose my home accent, and now I hope it survives forever, if not in me, at least in others in Appalachia.

The prototypical Appalachian pronunciation marker, of course, is in the way we say “I,” the perpendicular pronoun. Our rendering of the vowel “I” is generally characterized as a flat “I.” This is in contract to the standard pronunciation, which is often summed up as a round “I.” I take issue with the description “flat”, and I will talk about that in a minute. But I do have to say that I think characterizing the standard pronunciation of “I” as round has some credibility. The sound does curve. It has a tail, in fact, that almost makes it sound like two syllables. You can’t say it quickly. You are forced to draw out the sound.

In contrast, the Appalachian “I” can be said in a fraction of a second. “Flat” somehow doesn’t convey that short sound. Borrowing a term from music, I would characterize it as the very opposite:  sharp rather than flat. It just has that cutoff sound that “sharp” conveys.

Names that have the same spelling don’t sound the same in Appalachia either. My Aunt Mary has, to her husband Gene, been “Murry” all her life. And that is also good. It’s the way Appalachians say the name, and it’s a difference worth keeping. Most of us have lost that, but Uncle Gene is in his tenth decade, and he is grounded in the old.

Setting aside punctuation issues, I could go on for a long time about Appalachian expressions, but I will confine myself to just one example here. About ten years ago, visiting my former town in Appalachia, I fell into conversation with a neighbor slightly younger than me, but much more genuinely Appalachian in his speech. He was talking about his family’s graveyard. (One of the characteristics of Appalachia is that nearly every family has its own graveyard, which the family maintains. The big commercial burying grounds are uncmmon here, especially if you get out of the towns and into the hollows.) He was talking about the hours he put in on his ancestors’ plots, and he said, about his siblings, “Now, I’m not throwing off on them, but…” What he was saying to me was that, while he was not criticizing them, it was an unfortunate fact that they were not putting in their share of work needed to maintain the graveyard. Internally, I greeted that expression with joy. It had passed from my mind years before, and meeting it again was like meeting an old friend. Then I got to thinking of “Shoot fire (the latter word pronounced “far”), and of “chimlee” instead of chimney, and was off on a recision to my my language youth. Other expressions came to mind, to my pleasure, but I will leave “Shoot fire”, “chimlee” and others to another day.

23 Comments
Rose Ballard
12/21/2013 08:47:45 am

Nina~~ I must say I envy you and Dean so much~ your travels~ your writings ~ and your beautiful way of life in general~~ I had to laugh of this posting~~ when I read where someone has written about doing things & writes me & ?~~ oh how I want to correct~ and say please write~~~ you and I or you and me~~ as far as speaking ~~ I somehow lost a little of the twang~ however never the slang~~ still say Hollers~~ though computer doesn't recognize it LOL

Reply
Nina Cornett link
12/21/2013 09:43:41 am

Rose,
I';m with you 100% about grammar like "Me and him went to Whitesburg." I love the old expressions and the old pronunciations, but I don't love bad grammar. Sadly, it seems to me that there's much more of it currently than when I was growing up. We spoke Appalachian, but mostly Appalachian with decent grammar. Dean says that the schools ought to drop most of the English curriculum and concentrate on teaching kids how to properly use have and had, did and done, was and were, etc. It's embarrassing to hear some of our county officials saying, "We done" this or that. And, sadly, we hear that all the time. An Englishwoman wrote a book about bad grammar titled, "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" especially about bad punctuation. I'll bet you'd love it.

Reply
Berma
12/21/2013 09:30:32 am

Wonderful! Some years ago I was in a hospital waiting room in Tulsa, OK and "struck up" a conservation with an elderly gentleman. After a few minutes of conversation he asked, "What part of Kentucky are you from?" I was flattered! Seems he had spent some time in Hazard when he was young. I love our language and my formal education failed in changing that.....I even used the term "fit" instead of "fought" in an oral presentation in a graduate class. Now that time I was a little embarrassed! Thanks for the article, Nina.

Reply
Nina Cornett link
12/21/2013 09:36:12 am

Oh, Berma, thanks for that! I had forgotten about the word "fit." We never used it, but it was used a lot around us. I'm beginning to think I'd like to make up a list of the old words and expressions, so if anyone out there wants to volunteer some, I'd be appreciative.

Reply
Nina Cornett link
12/21/2013 09:47:15 am

Rose, I have a PS. We were on King's Creek the other day, and Dean pointed out a Harm (Hiram) Mitchell sign, and told me he was the person mentioned in one of your commentaries.

Reply
Leslie McBride
12/22/2013 09:49:02 am

I love this, Nina! Have you read "How We Talked?" By Verna Mae Slone? If we got in trouble when we were little, my grandfather would say, "Looks like you're in a bad row of stumps."

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    Author

    Nina Cornett is  presently at work on a memoir, is pulling together a concept for a mystery novel  set in Alaska, and is keeping a log of the Cornetts' efforts to bring  attention to timber theft in Kentucky with the thought that it might be the germ  of a future book.

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