Talking Appalachian, page 6
Nonetheless, we can learn much about the history of American English, both for individual terms and for general patterns, from geographic research. Consider terms for a small stream. This is usually called a branch in the South and South Midland. This term, unknown in Britain, was documented as early as John Smith’s General History of Virginia (1624). Also found early in North Carolina and Georgia, it later spread into the South Midland as far as Kentucky, where it remains common. Its counterpart in the North Midland is run, traceable to Scotland and found throughout West Virginia, northern Virginia (note Bull Run of Civil War fame), Maryland, and most of Pennsylvania. The distribution of run suggests that it entered the colonies through the Chesapeake Bay. Creek, used throughout the South and Midland, came from England, where it originally referred to a tidal stream; in the Atlantic colonies it later spread inland to refer usually to a somewhat larger watercourse than a branch or a run. In the South Midland creek rhymes with Greek, but in the North Midland it rhymes with brick. Atlas surveys, in combination with other research, have shown how other terms have spread into the South Midland from the Lower South, such as peckerwood ‘rural white person’ and redworm ‘earthworm’.
Many other small groups of synonymous vocabulary have distinctive geographic patterns, some of which conform to the areas outlined earlier; others display startling exceptions, showing that items may have quite different lives of their own. One example is the existence of three terms for a noisy mock wedding-night celebration, usually held at the home of the newlyweds: belling (chiefly in German settlement areas of western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan); serenade (chiefly in the Atlantic states, including eastern Appalachia); and shivaree (from the French charivari, found chiefly in western Appalachia and westward). The boundary between serenade and shivaree runs along the Tennessee–North Carolina border in a fashion unlike any other words yet researched.39
Survey Account II: Dictionary of American Regional English
Another essential resource for studying patterns of regional English in the United States is the five-volume Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), a preeminent work of American lexicography and an unrivaled, permanent index to the country’s diverse cultures and varieties of English.40 Like the Oxford English Dictionary and other historical dictionaries, DARE dates every citation, so in most cases the reader can obtain a capsule view of the occurrence of a word’s forms and senses. DARE is set apart from other dictionaries by its meticulous banks of lengthy citations. The dictionary is equally an encyclopedia of the country’s regional life, natural history, and much more. DARE is a product of raw material of many kinds, including written literature (fiction, scientific reports, travel accounts, diaries, and so on), glossaries and word lists compiled by linguists and other observers, and Linguistic Atlas data, among many other sources. Every citation in the dictionary is given a regional or subregional label (e.g., those from James Still’s writings are given the label eKY, for eastern Kentucky). Two other features are especially noteworthy. For one, in the late 1960s the dictionary project surveyed over a thousand communities across the country, using a 2,000-item questionnaire, seeking terminology for all aspects of the country’s life. These responses enabled the mapping of thousands of terms, including many of those collected for the Linguistic Atlas. Using these 3 million responses, along with its other citations, DARE editors have assigned labels to many terms or their specific forms, variants, and senses. For purposes of this labeling, the Midland encompasses a territory stretching as far west as Missouri, and Appalachia includes all of West Virginia and parts of nine other states from central Pennsylvania to northern Alabama. DARE labels 389 items Appalachian, including everwho ‘whoever’, bad to ‘having an undesirable tendency to’ (as in “he was bad to drink”), and baking powders. Though it uses qualifiers like chiefly, especially, or formerly and bases the labels on twentieth-century evidence alone, DARE is a remarkable tool for exploring the English of the United States or that of its many regions, large and small. The dictionary labels and maps individual pieces of language; unlike the Linguistic Atlas, it does not seek to map broad regions. This emphasis takes nothing away from the many uses to which the dictionary can be put to study the regional diversity of American English and the historical development of countless words.
Such exploration is greatly facilitated by the indexes to DARE labels.41 These list 121 items labeled from Kentucky (e.g., coffee sack ‘burlap bag’, hobby ‘small, hand-shaped corn cake’, hogback ‘independent political candidate’, stir-off ‘neighborhood party to make molasses’); 111 from North Carolina (e.g., baseborn ‘illegitimate [said of a child]’, boomer ‘diminutive red squirrel’, house plunder ‘house furniture’, sochan ‘an edible wild green’); 44 from Tennessee (e.g., dry-land fish ‘edible morel’, fee grabber ‘law-enforcement officer’, hunk ‘country bumpkin’, johnny walkers ‘makeshift stilts’); and 48 from West Virginia (e.g., ackempucky ‘jelly-like food’, filth ‘underbrush, weeds’, jim around ‘do odd jobs’, ribey ‘scrawny’). Such compilations confirm the fact that much of the country’s English is local or subregional in nature. Of the 389 items whose distribution is labeled “Appalachian,” 294 (75.6 percent) are further specified as “sAppalachian” (i.e., southern Appalachian), indicating their concentration in the southern half of the region. The samples above hardly begin to suggest the many ways to taste the fruits of a dictionary project now nearly complete after half a century in the making.
The comprehensive research conducted by the Linguistic Atlas and by DARE enables one to consider two general, related questions of historical interest: (1) How much of the vocabulary found in the Midland and Appalachia can be traced to other languages or to specific settlement groups, parts of the British Isles, or elsewhere in Europe? and (2) How much of it is new or “made in America” or even “made in Appalachia”? Despite the fact that the English of Appalachia is most often cited as preserving older forms, commentary on its antecedents remained anecdotal—with no detailed attempt to determine its regional sources abroad (i.e., to test the Elizabethan and Scotch-Irish hypotheses)—before the 1980s.42
With Pennsylvania’s population being one-third German speaking at the time of the American Revolution, it is not surprising that most items labeled “Pennsylvania” by the Linguistic Atlas or DARE come from German. These include simple borrowings like belsnickel ‘Santa Claus’ and ferhoodle ‘to ruin, spoil’, as well as loan translations like sawbuck, smearcase, and possibly snake feeder. Other terms of German derivation include panhas ‘dish of meat scraps’, snits ‘quartered dried apples’, and sweeny ‘atrophy of a horse’s shoulder muscles’. Since English and German are related languages, it is not surprising that some of their forms share the same basic meaning and thus that English-looking terms and constructions have been reinforced by German ones. Two of these are especially pertinent to Appalachia: leave ‘let’ (as in “leave him go”) and want + preposition with an elliptical infinitive (e.g., want in ‘want to go/come in’). Both of these usages are documented in Scotland and Ulster, so they (and, no doubt, others) have a blended ancestry.43
Besides those derived from German, very few words identified as Appalachian have a historical derivation other than from the British Isles. Cherokee has contributed to place names (especially of rivers) in six states of southern Appalachia, but that language is the source of only a handful of vocabulary, mostly for flora and fauna, in the English of western North Carolina, including catoosa bass, cullowee ‘an edible wild green’, sochan ‘an edible wild green’, and talala bird ‘a woodpecker’. Contrary to occasional popular belief, no evidence has been produced of a Celtic language ever being spoken in Appalachia. It is possible that some early Scotch-Irish settlers were bilingual, knowing either Irish or Scottish Gaelic, but this has yet to be confirmed. It is clear that the Scotch-Irish brought some words with them that originated from Celtic languages, such as clabber, but these are extremely few.44 Many Scotch-Irish knew Scots, however, a close relative to English that is best known through the writings of Robert Burns. In the generation after the American Revolution, newspapers in western Pennsylvania featured poetry on local political topics written in Ulster Scots, especially the poems of David Bruce, who wrote under the name “The Scots-Irishman.”45 As an identifiable language variety, Scots apparently survived the emigrant generation, but it is unclear to what extent it was a community language or merely a conscious poetic idiom.
Since the 1980s, researchers have compared Appalachian features with regional ones in twentieth-century Britain. Michael Ellis compared thirty-two vocabulary items from east Tennessee to those from parts of England and found that eight corresponded to northern England and five to the English Midlands; all but one of the remaining terms showed no correspondence. Of seventy-six pronunciations compared, twenty-eight showed a greater similarity with southern England or the west Midlands and only four with northern England.46 Although he found several specific correspondences (e.g., the Appalachian waspers ‘wasps’ to the English west Midlands), the overall pattern was mixed. Ellis demonstrated that Appalachian English has connections with more than one region of England. Edgar Schneider compared Appalachian vocabulary to that of both England and Scotland using a modern-day glossary and the English Dialect Dictionary.47 He found the strongest correlation with Yorkshire and Northumbria in northern England and secondarily with Lincoln-shire and the central and west Midlands, concluding that “the North of England and Scotland are the most important donor varieties for the Appalachian vocabulary.”48
These scholars have demonstrated that, for vocabulary and pronunciation (assuming little change in British regional speech since the eighteenth century), we must expand the varieties of English contributing to the English of Appalachia to include those of the north and west of England. Many of these items could have come from such regions either directly or indirectly through Ulster. The consensus of research to date is that in pronunciation, the English of Appalachia reflects primarily a heritage from England. Further study will undoubtedly continue to find that many traditional pronunciations in Appalachia were once widely current in eighteenth-century England, including among educated speakers (e.g., join pronounced as jine, oblige as obleege). At the same time, few items or pronunciations traceable to Scotland or Ulster will likely be found; ones identified by the Linguistic Atlas in Pennsylvania (e.g., drouth ‘drought’, rhyming with tooth) do not occur farther south. The Appalachian vowel system is, like elsewhere in America, based on that of southern England, with the same number and type of distinctions between vowels, except for a few minor details. However different in rhythm and intonation the speech of early Scotch-Irish settlers might have been (and these characteristics made them clearly identifiable in Pennsylvania), like others, they and their descendants adopted their vowels from neighbors of English ancestry.
Emigrants from Ulster found themselves in all mainland colonies, with significant numbers landing at Chesapeake ports and at Charles Town (as it was then called), South Carolina. However, by far the largest proportion debarked at Delaware Valley ports and spread inland.49 Many ultimately settled in parts of Appalachia, and a great many more of their children and grandchildren did so. By many accounts, these descendants were the predominant white settlers in the backcountry from central Pennsylvania south to Georgia after about 1730.
When it comes to connections with the Old World, the Scotch-Irish element is the strongest for grammar and, to some extent, for vocabulary. Many vocabulary items were cited earlier. Six of the twenty items the Linguistic Atlas identified as Midland are traceable at least in part to Ulster: hull, piece, poke, (quarter) till, want (to get) off, and you’ns.50 The reasons for this significant proportion may be debated, but the generalization is soundly based on a wealth of empirical evidence. Following are some features of traditional English in Appalachia having a primarily Scotch-Irish ancestry:
1. Personal pronoun hit ‘it’.
2. Addition of all after pronouns to indicate inclusion (what all, who all, and so on).
3. Addition of suffix -s to verbs (and use of linking verb is) with plural noun subjects (but not with pronoun subjects): “people knows” versus “they know”; “people is” versus “they are.”
4. Use of they ‘there’ to introduce clauses: “They’s a problem with Bessie.”
5. Formation of nouns and pronouns with the addition of ’un (from one), producing young’un, big’un, you’uns, and so on. The last term has become almost a trademark of western Pennsylvania speech in recent years, especially in Pittsburgh, where it is usually spelled yinz or yunz. It remains in use farther south, as in east Tennessee, where it competes with you all and y’all. The first known use of you’uns dates from 1810, when Margaret Van Horn Dwight wrote from Ohio: “Youns is a word I have heard used several times, but what it means I don’t know, they use it so strangely.”51
6. Use of need followed by a verb past participle, as in “That boy needs taught a lesson.”
7. Use of the subordinate conjunction whenever ‘at the time that’, as in “Whenever I was young, people didn’t do that.”
8. Use of all the ‘the only’, as in “That was all the way we could go to school.”
Some well-known features of grammar in Appalachia have little if any trace of a Scotch-Irish heritage. The following ones come ultimately from England:52
1. Use of a- as a prefix on verb present participles: a-goin’, a-comin’.
2. Formation of possessive pronouns with the suffix -n: hern, hisn, yourn (as in “a book of yourn”).
3. Use of verbs whose principal parts are made regular by adding -ed: blowed, drawed, heared, seed, and so on.
4. Use of personal dative pronouns, as in “I bought me a dog.”
As already shown, every linguistic feature has a life of its own. We can never presume that their geographic distribution corresponds with that of any another, whether on the basis of ancestry or otherwise. However, if one were to ask where the Scotch-Irish influence is strongest today, a very good candidate would be western Pennsylvania. A booklet on Pittsburgh speech released some years ago included the following terms of Scotch-Irish ancestry: anymore ‘nowadays’, hap ‘quilt’, leave ‘let’, lenth ‘length’, nebby ‘nosey’, need (followed by a past participle), redd up ‘tidy up’, slippy ‘slippery’, wait on ‘wait for’, want + preposition, and yunz ‘you [plural]’.53
It may seem that we have left the Elizabethan hypothesis well behind, and in effect, this is true. Researchers scrutinizing the English of Appalachia have had difficulty confirming past claims by amateur observers who often lacked historical dictionaries to consult. The 1899 statement by William Goodell Frost cited earlier identifies seven terms he claimed were centuries old, but four of these were first cited by the Oxford English Dictionary in only the nineteenth century and thus can hardly be considered very old, much less Elizabethan.
Answering the question of how much of the distinctive English of Appalachia is new (versus the proportion that can be traced to other languages and to various settlement groups) is quite easy. Of the sixteen terms listed earlier that DARE labels as being from Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia (four from each state), only one (baseborn) is not an Americanism. A scan of the 389 terms DARE labels Appalachian finds that the overwhelming majority are obviously modern. Explaining why and how terms become regional, even in the age of unprecedented movement of people and contact with national varieties of English, is beyond the scope of this essay. That task awaits future investigators, for whom the Linguistic Atlas, DARE, and other resources have laid an immense baseline. Suffice it to say that most of the distinctive vocabulary in Appalachia is recently minted, showing the creativity of modern American culture and that of the people of Appalachia as well.
The Linguistic Atlas and DARE have added immensely to our understanding of American English, but for all their merit, they lack time depth. Speakers surveyed by the Linguistic Atlas, though often elderly, were not born before about 1850, and for Appalachia, DARE had few pre-1875 works to consult other than stories by backwoods humorists such as George Washington Harris, cited earlier.54 Reconstructing the roots of English in Appalachia is an arduous, long-term undertaking made very difficult by the dearth of documents written by settlers that provide evidence of their speech patterns. This limitation does not compromise existing conclusions so much as it reminds researchers to keep seeking early evidence. For purposes of illustration, we can consider two substantial sources produced by settlers that exemplify usages from two or more centuries ago. One is Documentary History of Dunmore’s War 1774, a collection of letters pertaining to the defense of settlements along the Holston and Clinch Rivers, in what is now southwestern Virginia and southern West Virginia, against the Shawnee and Cherokee, indigenous tribes whose lands were being entered or threatened.55 Therein are found the following items:
a-: “He was informed, before he left Holston, that there was 2 or 3 Indians there a hunting” (41). [DARE label: throughout the U.S. but especially frequent Midland, Southwest, less frequent South, New England]; inherited from England.
against ‘by the time that’: “I have requested of Capt. Crockett & Doack one half of their Men to meet against next Tuesday or sooner at the Town House” (58). [DARE label: chiefly Midland]; from Scotland and Ulster.
is (verb, used with a plural subject): “Please give me instructions how the Forts is to be provided with Provisions especially Flour” (136). [DARE label: chiefly South, South Midland]; from Scotland and Ulster. By the same token, the suffix -s occurs on a verb with a plural subject: “These men tells me they are fresh Signs of Indians Seen Every Morning” (99).
cove (noun): “This day I leave this neighborhood to go towards the Rye Coves” (3). [DARE label: especially South Midland]. Cove originally referred to an inlet of the sea in England and in early America, but by the late eighteenth century, it applied to an inland topographical feature.
