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.
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.
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