Talking Appalachian, page 10
The second study is not framed specifically as a CoP, but it unpacks the demographic variables of race or ethnicity, age, and gender and looks at how identities influence language use. Kirk Hazen’s study examines variation within one North Carolina county by closely examining forty-five speakers of three ethnicities (African American, European American, and Native American) in three different age groups and divided about equally by sex.20 Hazen’s purpose is to explore “cultural identity,” and he does so by analyzing how speakers linguistically orient themselves to either the local culture or the greater regional culture by exhibiting certain linguistic traits. Specifically, he examines grammar forms associated with AAVE (e.g., the absence of be in sentences such as “He going”). His results show that neither ethnicity per se nor age determines an individual’s language choice. Rather, it depends on how the speaker self-identifies. For example, Native Americans who see themselves as part of the local community use more AAVE features in their language. Hazen hypothesizes that this is because Native Americans and African Americans have had a historically close relationship as marginalized people in the area. In contrast, Native Americans who view themselves as part of the larger culture exhibit fewer AAVE characteristics; they do not align themselves with local blacks. We might expect Native Americans in one relatively small geographic area to speak similarly, but Hazen reminds us that “identity categories like gender, ethnicity, and cultural identity are not monolithic social factors” but “are constructed out of evolving local practice.” He concludes: “Cultural identity helps explain interspeaker variation, both within and across generations, for those speakers who would otherwise share many of their sociological traits. A part of who a person is, cultural identity influences the outcomes of other subidentities: being an expanded-identity Native American is different from being local-identity Native American.”21
The third body of work is situated in a place not usually included in discussions of AE: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Barbara Johnstone and Scott Kiesling’s work on the local dialect, Pittsburghese, is another example of local and historically situated speech.22
In general, Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have not been considered in studies of Appalachia until recently. Both residents and outsiders commonly refer to the area as Pennsyltucky. The term Pennsyltucky itself is a curious blend of Pennsylvania and Kentucky and has been used as both a pejorative label (by outsiders who want to associate the worst characteristics of the rural states) and an affectionate term (by natives of rural Pennsylvania). The coined term links the region to the greater Appalachian geographic region and its history. Noting the exploitation of the Pennsylvania mountains, a practice common in Appalachia, Samuel A. MacDonald writes: “The Allegheny region, [is] known to many locals as ‘Pennsyltucky’ for its peculiar mix of rural and industrial culture.”23
Western Pennsylvania shares a similar linguistic history with other parts of Appalachia. In particular, the earliest seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers were Scots-Irish who were part of a general migration westward and along the Ohio River and Appalachian Mountains. Pittsburghese, then, originated with these immigrants, which explains why some local Pittsburgh language features are also common in other varieties of AE, including the following:24
r-intrusion
worsh for wash
lowered ire sequence
tar for tire, far for fire
intrusive t
oncet
glide reduction
taam for time
h-intrusion
overhalls for overalls
positive anymore
“Anymore I don’t go there”
plural count noun
“It’s ten mile up the road”
object pronouns
“Me and him went out”
So why did Pittsburgh develop its own idiosyncratic language variety? Johnstone and Kiesling’s work for the Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project probes this question and finds that the answer is based on the history of the area, consistent with immigration, settlement, and industry. In the period of profound immigration, 1880–1920, the immigrant laborers were mostly from eastern and southern Europe; when they arrived, they adopted many of the speech patterns of the original Scots-Irish settlers. Because of their working-class status, their speech was stigmatized as working class or uneducated. However, that does not explain why this local-sounding speech persisted even as the area became more technologically and educationally savvy. Much of Pittsburghese’s vitality has to do with the identity constructions of the people who grew up in ethnic, often working-class enclaves within the city. The Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project has documented local speakers and attributes much of the local dialect to issues of identity and belonging: “Generally, older, long-time residents of Pittsburgh use Pittsburgh speech the most. Also, men are generally more likely to speak with a local accent than are women, possibly because of a stronger interest in displaying local identity, and because speaking ‘correctly’ is often more important to women in the workplace than it is to men, who may need to speak more like the other people they work with.”25 Many locals continue to be proud of the city’s working-class history, as it resonates with personal values such as being hardworking and honest—values that are part of Pittsburgh’s immigrant labor history and its development as an industrial center. This identity continues as a collective urban identity among certain groups and is linguistically realized on T-shirts and coffee mugs and in newspaper editorials.
Johnstone and Kiesling conclude their analysis by stating that among speakers of Pittsburghese, “self conscious performances of social identities [are] linked with place as well as class.”26 Bonnie McElhinny’s 1999 study of eight officers (four men and four women) in the Pittsburgh Police Department resonates with this idea. All eight police officers aligned themselves with the city’s identity and spoke Pittsburghese. According to McElhinny, “all of the speakers . . . would be conventionally categorized as working class . . . [and] their job often required them to display some kind of street smarts,”27 implying a group of people, a community of practice, that performs language in concert with their identities.
It is interesting and certainly historically important to understand broad regional dialects such as “Appalachian,” for it provides insight into larger social and economic issues. Yet at this juncture in our knowledge of how and why language varieties are produced and transmitted, it seems much more relevant to place such studies in specific times and places, as Mallinson and Childs, Hazen, and Johnstone and Kiesling do. The old notion that all people living in the Appalachian region use only one language variety—and usually the stereotypically negative variety at that—has been unfortunate. Moreover, belief in the stereotype has impeded more productive lines of sociolinguistic research, including examinations of why a group of speakers uses a particular language variety and not another. Looking at specific varieties of language within the Appalachian region and contextualizing them can lead to more significant findings that link language use to issues of belonging—essentially, a sense of identity (see Sohn’s essay) and power (see Puckett’s essay).
Notes
1. William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, Atlas of North American English (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), 316.
2. Katherine Ledford, Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).
3. Kirk Hazen, “Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community,” Language 78, no. 2 (2002): 240.
4. Michael B. Montgomery, “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” in Language Myths, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 66–76.
5. Dwight Billings, “Appalachians,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
6. John Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 12.
7. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-based Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461–90.
8. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
9. Anita Puckett, “The ‘Value’ of Dialect as Object: The Case of Appalachian English,” Pragmatics 13, no. 4 (2003): 539–49.
10. James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1999).
11. Puckett, “The ‘Value’ of Dialect as Object.”
12. Gee, Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 21.
13. Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 21.
14. Gee, Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 21.
15. Christine Mallinson and Becky Childs, “The Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity: African American English in Appalachia,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10, no. 1–2 (2008): 129–42.
16. Ibid., 129.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 131.
19. Patricia Smith Jones, “Dialect as a Deterrent to Cultural Stripping: Why Appalachian Migrants Continue to Talk that Talk,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 253.
20. Hazen, “Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community,” 240.
21. Ibid., 250, 253.
22. Barbara Johnstone and Scott Kiesling, “Dialect and Identity in Steeler Nation” (plenary address for Steel Cities Conference, Sheffield, UK, July 1, 2006).
23. Samuel A. MacDonald, The Agony of an American Wilderness: Loggers, Environmentalists and the Struggle for Control of a Forgotten Forest (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 2.
24. Johnstone and Kiesling, “Dialect and Identity in Steeler Nation.”
25. Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project, http://english.cmu/pittsburghspeech.
26. Johnstone and Kiesling, “Dialect and Identity in Steeler Nation.”
27. Bonnie McElhinny, “More on the Third Dialect in English: Linguistic Constraints on the Use of Three Phonological Variables in Pittsburgh,” Language Variation and Change 11, no. 2 (1999): 177.
African American Speech in Southern Appalachia
Walt Wolfram
Despite their invisibility in traditional portraits of Appalachia, African Americans have been a part of southern Appalachian culture since the eighteenth century. In fact, nearly 10 percent of the population of the Mountain South is African American.1 Even though the black population was much less dense than in the lowland, plantation South, African Americans in southern Appalachia were not cushioned from the social and political impact of enslavement and social subordination.2 At the same time, there were differences. Wilma Dunaway notes that in the Mountain South, slaveholdings per household were smaller than in the lowland South, more ethnic mixing occurred between African Americans and Native Americans, slaves were more frequently assigned to non-agricultural occupations, and there was heavier reliance on the labor of women and children. In this context, a number of small rural and some urban African American communities were established in southern Appalachia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and have stably existed since that time.3
Linguistic Myths
Until the past decade, the speech of African Americans in the Appalachian range has largely been ignored or dismissed.4 Some of the oversight is attributable, no doubt, to the general cultural and sociohistorical oversight of blacks in the Mountain South, but some sociolinguistic circumstances contributed to this neglect as well. Notwithstanding the significant contributions of dialectologists and sociolinguists to the description of regional, social, and ethnic varieties of American English over the past half century, the field was lulled into accepting several sociolinguistic assumptions that may have contributed to the lack of attention to African American speech in this region.5 One of the conclusions that emerged from the early wave of sociolinguistic studies of African American English (AAE) was the observation that a common set of structural pronunciation and grammatical features characterizes the vernacular speech of African Americans, regardless of where it is spoken.6 It was assumed that AAE possessed a kind of homogeneity that united its use in different regional contexts and in urban and rural settings as well. As William Labov—arguably, the most influential voice on the study of AAE for more than four decades—put it, “By the ‘black English vernacular’ [AAE] we mean the relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black young in most parts of the United States today, especially in the inner city areas. . . . It is also spoken in most rural areas and used in the casual, intimate speech of many adults.”7 From this perspective, it could be assumed that descriptions of AAE for the Mountain South would match those of AAE varieties elsewhere.
By the same token, analogous assumptions of homogeneity have been made about varieties of Appalachian English, and it has sometimes been assumed that there is a uniform language that extends throughout the Appalachian range. For example, Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, in one of the earliest descriptions of Appalachian speech, noted, “We use the term AE [Appalachian English] to refer to the variety of English most typically associated with the working class population,” and “many of the features we describe have relatively wide distribution within the central Appalachian range.”8 From such a perspective, it might be assumed that a general description of Appalachian English could be applied regardless of region and ethnicity in the Mountain South. In the words of Thomas Bonfiglio, the illusion of homogeneity “is largely a function of secondary revision that glosses over differences and constructs a linear metanarrative . . . there is something in the popular consciousness that desires to see a unity of geography, ethnicity, and language.”9 More recent descriptions of Appalachia emphasize the diversity of language within the Mountain South.10
Most studies of AAE have focused on the forms that are most different from standard American English (SAE), and there has been little study of how AAE is differentiated in different regions and within communities themselves. The traditional definition of AAE emphasizes its most nonstandard, or vernacular, variety, and most data-collection efforts center on how to access these vernacular forms instead of gathering data from a full range of community participants on the standard–vernacular continuum. Even standard varieties of English become idealized in the process of describing AAE, as if there were a unitary version of spoken SAE. A similar preoccupation has occurred in the study of southern Appalachian speech, where descriptions tend to focus on working-class speakers who are most distant from SAE, rather than speakers who represent the range of social strata within the community.11 In other words, researchers become preoccupied with describing the most vernacular varieties of Appalachian speech in a way that idealizes the so-called authentic vernacular speaker, rather than acknowledging the full range of variation among Appalachian speakers.12 In reality, identity, style, and politics intersect with the full range of language fluctuation that occurs in varieties of both Appalachian English and AAE, wherever they are found.13
Linguistic Issues
There are several possibilities in terms of explaining African American speech in Appalachia. As Kirk Hazen points out, there may be shared features between African Americans and European Americans that make the speech of these groups indistinguishable in actual dialect use and undifferentiated in dialect perception.14 At the other extreme, we might find distinct varieties of English that demark a clear-cut ethnolinguistic boundary so that African American speech maintains the kind of sociocultural distinctiveness that has been noted in traditional sociolinguistic studies of AAE. Or there may be different constellations of shared and distinctive structures that are sensitive to the local context and to community dynamics. Of course, it is also possible that the speech of African Americans in the Mountain South is characterized by a range of language and social relations and that demographic, social, and sociopsychological factors intersect in defining the use of these language varieties in particular communities. Certainly, there is great diversity in the African American communities of Appalachia, making it difficult to generalize from community to community. Notwithstanding these differences, there may be other factors that unify African American communities in the Mountain South, such as the common imposition of segregation laws that led to separate schools, separate churches, and other forms of institutional and social segregation. As some African American scholars have pointed out, the underlying issue is one of race and ethnicity manifested in sociolinguistic diversity.15 Questions about African American speech in the context of southern Appalachia can be answered only by examining empirically some actual African American communities in this region.
Empirical Evidence
We can consider the relationship of African American speech to local speech in the Mountain South by examining several types of diagnostic linguistics structures, that is, structures that set apart different regional, social, or ethnic groups. Before examining some of these representative variables, however, it is necessary to understand that although dialects are sometimes set apart by qualitative differences (i.e., one variety always uses a structure that another variety never does), they just as often exhibit quantitative differences in which language varieties are distinct in terms of the relative frequency of usage rather than the categorical absence or presence of a structural form. For example, all speakers of English sometimes use the form -in’ for the unstressed suffix -ing, as in swimmin’ for swimming or runnin’ for running. At the same time, some groups and individuals use the -in’ form significantly more frequently than others:16 low-status speakers may use it more than high-status speakers, men more than women, southerners more than northerners, and some southern mountain communities more than some southern lowland communities. Thus, certain dimensions of African American and Appalachian speech are defined by patterns of relative use rather than by categorical patterns of use or nonuse.
The third body of work is situated in a place not usually included in discussions of AE: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Barbara Johnstone and Scott Kiesling’s work on the local dialect, Pittsburghese, is another example of local and historically situated speech.22
In general, Pittsburgh and western Pennsylvania have not been considered in studies of Appalachia until recently. Both residents and outsiders commonly refer to the area as Pennsyltucky. The term Pennsyltucky itself is a curious blend of Pennsylvania and Kentucky and has been used as both a pejorative label (by outsiders who want to associate the worst characteristics of the rural states) and an affectionate term (by natives of rural Pennsylvania). The coined term links the region to the greater Appalachian geographic region and its history. Noting the exploitation of the Pennsylvania mountains, a practice common in Appalachia, Samuel A. MacDonald writes: “The Allegheny region, [is] known to many locals as ‘Pennsyltucky’ for its peculiar mix of rural and industrial culture.”23
Western Pennsylvania shares a similar linguistic history with other parts of Appalachia. In particular, the earliest seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settlers were Scots-Irish who were part of a general migration westward and along the Ohio River and Appalachian Mountains. Pittsburghese, then, originated with these immigrants, which explains why some local Pittsburgh language features are also common in other varieties of AE, including the following:24
r-intrusion
worsh for wash
lowered ire sequence
tar for tire, far for fire
intrusive t
oncet
glide reduction
taam for time
h-intrusion
overhalls for overalls
positive anymore
“Anymore I don’t go there”
plural count noun
“It’s ten mile up the road”
object pronouns
“Me and him went out”
So why did Pittsburgh develop its own idiosyncratic language variety? Johnstone and Kiesling’s work for the Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project probes this question and finds that the answer is based on the history of the area, consistent with immigration, settlement, and industry. In the period of profound immigration, 1880–1920, the immigrant laborers were mostly from eastern and southern Europe; when they arrived, they adopted many of the speech patterns of the original Scots-Irish settlers. Because of their working-class status, their speech was stigmatized as working class or uneducated. However, that does not explain why this local-sounding speech persisted even as the area became more technologically and educationally savvy. Much of Pittsburghese’s vitality has to do with the identity constructions of the people who grew up in ethnic, often working-class enclaves within the city. The Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project has documented local speakers and attributes much of the local dialect to issues of identity and belonging: “Generally, older, long-time residents of Pittsburgh use Pittsburgh speech the most. Also, men are generally more likely to speak with a local accent than are women, possibly because of a stronger interest in displaying local identity, and because speaking ‘correctly’ is often more important to women in the workplace than it is to men, who may need to speak more like the other people they work with.”25 Many locals continue to be proud of the city’s working-class history, as it resonates with personal values such as being hardworking and honest—values that are part of Pittsburgh’s immigrant labor history and its development as an industrial center. This identity continues as a collective urban identity among certain groups and is linguistically realized on T-shirts and coffee mugs and in newspaper editorials.
Johnstone and Kiesling conclude their analysis by stating that among speakers of Pittsburghese, “self conscious performances of social identities [are] linked with place as well as class.”26 Bonnie McElhinny’s 1999 study of eight officers (four men and four women) in the Pittsburgh Police Department resonates with this idea. All eight police officers aligned themselves with the city’s identity and spoke Pittsburghese. According to McElhinny, “all of the speakers . . . would be conventionally categorized as working class . . . [and] their job often required them to display some kind of street smarts,”27 implying a group of people, a community of practice, that performs language in concert with their identities.
It is interesting and certainly historically important to understand broad regional dialects such as “Appalachian,” for it provides insight into larger social and economic issues. Yet at this juncture in our knowledge of how and why language varieties are produced and transmitted, it seems much more relevant to place such studies in specific times and places, as Mallinson and Childs, Hazen, and Johnstone and Kiesling do. The old notion that all people living in the Appalachian region use only one language variety—and usually the stereotypically negative variety at that—has been unfortunate. Moreover, belief in the stereotype has impeded more productive lines of sociolinguistic research, including examinations of why a group of speakers uses a particular language variety and not another. Looking at specific varieties of language within the Appalachian region and contextualizing them can lead to more significant findings that link language use to issues of belonging—essentially, a sense of identity (see Sohn’s essay) and power (see Puckett’s essay).
Notes
1. William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, Atlas of North American English (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006), 316.
2. Katherine Ledford, Back Talk from Appalachia: Confronting Stereotypes (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999).
3. Kirk Hazen, “Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community,” Language 78, no. 2 (2002): 240.
4. Michael B. Montgomery, “In the Appalachians They Speak Like Shakespeare,” in Language Myths, ed. Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 66–76.
5. Dwight Billings, “Appalachians,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989).
6. John Williams, Appalachia: A History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 12.
7. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet, “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as Community-based Practice,” Annual Review of Anthropology 21 (1992): 461–90.
8. Etienne Wenger, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
9. Anita Puckett, “The ‘Value’ of Dialect as Object: The Case of Appalachian English,” Pragmatics 13, no. 4 (2003): 539–49.
10. James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis (New York: Routledge, 1999).
11. Puckett, “The ‘Value’ of Dialect as Object.”
12. Gee, Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 21.
13. Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 21.
14. Gee, Introduction to Discourse Analysis, 21.
15. Christine Mallinson and Becky Childs, “The Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity: African American English in Appalachia,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10, no. 1–2 (2008): 129–42.
16. Ibid., 129.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 131.
19. Patricia Smith Jones, “Dialect as a Deterrent to Cultural Stripping: Why Appalachian Migrants Continue to Talk that Talk,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 3, no. 2 (1997): 253.
20. Hazen, “Identity and Language Variation in a Rural Community,” 240.
21. Ibid., 250, 253.
22. Barbara Johnstone and Scott Kiesling, “Dialect and Identity in Steeler Nation” (plenary address for Steel Cities Conference, Sheffield, UK, July 1, 2006).
23. Samuel A. MacDonald, The Agony of an American Wilderness: Loggers, Environmentalists and the Struggle for Control of a Forgotten Forest (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 2.
24. Johnstone and Kiesling, “Dialect and Identity in Steeler Nation.”
25. Pittsburgh Speech and Society Project, http://english.cmu/pittsburghspeech.
26. Johnstone and Kiesling, “Dialect and Identity in Steeler Nation.”
27. Bonnie McElhinny, “More on the Third Dialect in English: Linguistic Constraints on the Use of Three Phonological Variables in Pittsburgh,” Language Variation and Change 11, no. 2 (1999): 177.
African American Speech in Southern Appalachia
Walt Wolfram
Despite their invisibility in traditional portraits of Appalachia, African Americans have been a part of southern Appalachian culture since the eighteenth century. In fact, nearly 10 percent of the population of the Mountain South is African American.1 Even though the black population was much less dense than in the lowland, plantation South, African Americans in southern Appalachia were not cushioned from the social and political impact of enslavement and social subordination.2 At the same time, there were differences. Wilma Dunaway notes that in the Mountain South, slaveholdings per household were smaller than in the lowland South, more ethnic mixing occurred between African Americans and Native Americans, slaves were more frequently assigned to non-agricultural occupations, and there was heavier reliance on the labor of women and children. In this context, a number of small rural and some urban African American communities were established in southern Appalachia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and have stably existed since that time.3
Linguistic Myths
Until the past decade, the speech of African Americans in the Appalachian range has largely been ignored or dismissed.4 Some of the oversight is attributable, no doubt, to the general cultural and sociohistorical oversight of blacks in the Mountain South, but some sociolinguistic circumstances contributed to this neglect as well. Notwithstanding the significant contributions of dialectologists and sociolinguists to the description of regional, social, and ethnic varieties of American English over the past half century, the field was lulled into accepting several sociolinguistic assumptions that may have contributed to the lack of attention to African American speech in this region.5 One of the conclusions that emerged from the early wave of sociolinguistic studies of African American English (AAE) was the observation that a common set of structural pronunciation and grammatical features characterizes the vernacular speech of African Americans, regardless of where it is spoken.6 It was assumed that AAE possessed a kind of homogeneity that united its use in different regional contexts and in urban and rural settings as well. As William Labov—arguably, the most influential voice on the study of AAE for more than four decades—put it, “By the ‘black English vernacular’ [AAE] we mean the relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black young in most parts of the United States today, especially in the inner city areas. . . . It is also spoken in most rural areas and used in the casual, intimate speech of many adults.”7 From this perspective, it could be assumed that descriptions of AAE for the Mountain South would match those of AAE varieties elsewhere.
By the same token, analogous assumptions of homogeneity have been made about varieties of Appalachian English, and it has sometimes been assumed that there is a uniform language that extends throughout the Appalachian range. For example, Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, in one of the earliest descriptions of Appalachian speech, noted, “We use the term AE [Appalachian English] to refer to the variety of English most typically associated with the working class population,” and “many of the features we describe have relatively wide distribution within the central Appalachian range.”8 From such a perspective, it might be assumed that a general description of Appalachian English could be applied regardless of region and ethnicity in the Mountain South. In the words of Thomas Bonfiglio, the illusion of homogeneity “is largely a function of secondary revision that glosses over differences and constructs a linear metanarrative . . . there is something in the popular consciousness that desires to see a unity of geography, ethnicity, and language.”9 More recent descriptions of Appalachia emphasize the diversity of language within the Mountain South.10
Most studies of AAE have focused on the forms that are most different from standard American English (SAE), and there has been little study of how AAE is differentiated in different regions and within communities themselves. The traditional definition of AAE emphasizes its most nonstandard, or vernacular, variety, and most data-collection efforts center on how to access these vernacular forms instead of gathering data from a full range of community participants on the standard–vernacular continuum. Even standard varieties of English become idealized in the process of describing AAE, as if there were a unitary version of spoken SAE. A similar preoccupation has occurred in the study of southern Appalachian speech, where descriptions tend to focus on working-class speakers who are most distant from SAE, rather than speakers who represent the range of social strata within the community.11 In other words, researchers become preoccupied with describing the most vernacular varieties of Appalachian speech in a way that idealizes the so-called authentic vernacular speaker, rather than acknowledging the full range of variation among Appalachian speakers.12 In reality, identity, style, and politics intersect with the full range of language fluctuation that occurs in varieties of both Appalachian English and AAE, wherever they are found.13
Linguistic Issues
There are several possibilities in terms of explaining African American speech in Appalachia. As Kirk Hazen points out, there may be shared features between African Americans and European Americans that make the speech of these groups indistinguishable in actual dialect use and undifferentiated in dialect perception.14 At the other extreme, we might find distinct varieties of English that demark a clear-cut ethnolinguistic boundary so that African American speech maintains the kind of sociocultural distinctiveness that has been noted in traditional sociolinguistic studies of AAE. Or there may be different constellations of shared and distinctive structures that are sensitive to the local context and to community dynamics. Of course, it is also possible that the speech of African Americans in the Mountain South is characterized by a range of language and social relations and that demographic, social, and sociopsychological factors intersect in defining the use of these language varieties in particular communities. Certainly, there is great diversity in the African American communities of Appalachia, making it difficult to generalize from community to community. Notwithstanding these differences, there may be other factors that unify African American communities in the Mountain South, such as the common imposition of segregation laws that led to separate schools, separate churches, and other forms of institutional and social segregation. As some African American scholars have pointed out, the underlying issue is one of race and ethnicity manifested in sociolinguistic diversity.15 Questions about African American speech in the context of southern Appalachia can be answered only by examining empirically some actual African American communities in this region.
Empirical Evidence
We can consider the relationship of African American speech to local speech in the Mountain South by examining several types of diagnostic linguistics structures, that is, structures that set apart different regional, social, or ethnic groups. Before examining some of these representative variables, however, it is necessary to understand that although dialects are sometimes set apart by qualitative differences (i.e., one variety always uses a structure that another variety never does), they just as often exhibit quantitative differences in which language varieties are distinct in terms of the relative frequency of usage rather than the categorical absence or presence of a structural form. For example, all speakers of English sometimes use the form -in’ for the unstressed suffix -ing, as in swimmin’ for swimming or runnin’ for running. At the same time, some groups and individuals use the -in’ form significantly more frequently than others:16 low-status speakers may use it more than high-status speakers, men more than women, southerners more than northerners, and some southern mountain communities more than some southern lowland communities. Thus, certain dimensions of African American and Appalachian speech are defined by patterns of relative use rather than by categorical patterns of use or nonuse.
