Chapter 31: Language, Dialect, and the Politics of How You Sound

"The first time I opened my mouth in a college classroom, I could feel the room change. I hadn't said anything stupid. I hadn't said anything wrong. I just said it the way I'd always said things back home, and suddenly I wasn't a student anymore. I was a specimen." — Anonymous interview, Appalachian college graduate, quoted in a 2009 linguistic study

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Describe the major linguistic features of Appalachian English and their historical origins in Scots-Irish, northern English, and other settlement-era dialects
2. Demonstrate that Appalachian English is a legitimate dialect with deep historical roots — not "bad English," not "lazy speech," and not a failure of education
3. Analyze how accent functions as a class and regional marker in America — and why linguistic discrimination may be the last socially acceptable prejudice
4. Examine the practice of code-switching and the educational system's complex, often damaging relationship with mountain speech

The Moment You Open Your Mouth

There is a moment — it happens in job interviews, in college classrooms, in phone calls with customer service representatives, in any situation where you are being judged by a stranger — when an Appalachian person opens their mouth and everything changes.

Not because of what they said. Because of how they said it.

The vowels are different. The "I" in "mine" comes out rounder, more like "mahn." The "r" holds on at the end of words where other American dialects might soften it. The grammar follows patterns that sound wrong to people who have been taught that one particular way of organizing English sentences is the only correct way. Double modals stack up: "I might could do that." The a-prefix appears: "He was a-hunting up the ridge." Words surface that most Americans do not use: "liketa" ("I liketa died"), "fixin' to" ("I'm fixin' to head out"), "reckon" ("I reckon so").

And in that moment, the Appalachian speaker is sorted. Categorized. Dismissed. Not because they are less intelligent, less educated, or less capable than the person listening to them, but because American culture has constructed a hierarchy of speech in which certain dialects are coded as intelligent and others as ignorant — and Appalachian English sits near the bottom of that hierarchy.

This chapter is about language. It is about the specific features of Appalachian English, their historical origins, and the linguistic evidence that demonstrates they are not errors but legitimate, rule-governed features of a dialect with roots as deep as any variety of English spoken in America. But it is also about power. Because the story of Appalachian English is, at its core, a story about who gets to decide what counts as "proper" speech and what happens to people who speak differently.

What Appalachian English Actually Is

A Dialect, Not a Deficiency

The first thing that must be said clearly and without qualification: Appalachian English is a legitimate dialect of the English language.

A dialect is a variety of a language that is distinguished from other varieties by systematic differences in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary. Every person on Earth who speaks a language speaks a dialect of that language. There is no "dialects" versus "proper English" — there are only dialects, some of which have been granted social prestige and others of which have been stigmatized. The prestige of a dialect is determined by the social power of its speakers, not by any inherent linguistic superiority. Standard American English is not a purer or more correct form of English than Appalachian English, African American Vernacular English, or any other dialect. It is simply the dialect spoken by the people who hold the most economic and cultural power in American society.

This is not an ideological claim. It is a scientific one. Linguists — the scholars who study language as a natural phenomenon — are unanimous on this point. Every dialect of every language is a complete, rule-governed, internally consistent system of communication. Appalachian English is not "broken" Standard American English. It is its own system, with its own rules, its own history, and its own logic. When an Appalachian speaker says "I might could help you with that," they are not making a grammatical error. They are using a grammatical structure — the double modal — that is a systematic feature of their dialect, with a specific meaning that Standard American English cannot express as economically. (More on this below.)

The confusion arises because American culture has naturalized one dialect — Standard American English, roughly the English spoken by educated middle-class people in the northern and western United States — as "correct" and treated all other dialects as deviations from that norm. This is like declaring one species of bird "correct" and treating all other species as malformed versions of it. It makes no sense linguistically, but it makes a great deal of sense socially: the people who speak the "correct" dialect are the people who run the country, and defining their speech as correct reinforces their authority.

The Linguistic Features

Let us examine the specific features that distinguish Appalachian English, because understanding what the dialect actually does is essential to understanding that it does things for reasons.

A-prefixing. One of the most recognizable features of Appalachian English is the use of "a-" before present participles: "he was a-hunting," "she was a-singing," "they were a-running down the road." This is not a random insertion. A-prefixing follows specific grammatical rules: it attaches only to verbs (not adjectives — you would not say "the a-beautiful sunset"), only to words that begin with a consonant sound (not vowels — "a-eating" is ungrammatical in Appalachian English), and only in specific syntactic positions. The "a-" is a reduced form of the preposition "on" or "in," reflecting an older English construction ("he was on hunting") that was common in Early Modern English and survived in Appalachian speech long after it disappeared from other dialects. Case Study 1 examines this feature in depth.

R-retention. Appalachian English is rhotic — speakers pronounce the "r" at the end of words and before consonants ("car," "farm," "water") where many Eastern American dialects drop it. This feature is inherited from the Scots-Irish and Northern English dialects that dominated the settlement of the Appalachian region. Far from being a deviation from "proper" English, r-retention is the historically older pattern; the dropping of final "r" that characterizes Boston, New York, and many Southern Coastal dialects is the innovation.

Double modals. Appalachian English permits constructions that stack two modal verbs: "might could" ("I might could do that"), "might should" ("you might should see a doctor"), "might would" ("he might would come if you asked"). These constructions are ungrammatical in Standard American English but are systematic in Appalachian English and in Scots English, from which they derive. Double modals express a degree of tentativeness or politeness that single modals cannot: "I might could help you" is more tentative and more deferential than "I could help you" or "I might help you." The double modal encodes a social meaning — a polite hedging of commitment — that Standard American English can only achieve through longer, clumsier circumlocutions.

Liketa. The word "liketa" (often spelled "like to" or "liked to") functions as an adverb meaning "almost" or "nearly," with a connotation of dramatic emphasis: "I liketa died laughing," "she liketa fell off the porch." The construction derives from the older English "like to have," meaning "was on the verge of" or "came close to." It is not slang. It is not jargon. It is a grammatical feature with a documented historical lineage traceable to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English usage.

Fixin' to. "Fixin' to" is a construction meaning "about to" or "preparing to": "I'm fixin' to leave," "she's fixin' to start supper." It functions as a quasi-modal verb, expressing immediate future intention. The construction is shared with many other Southern American English dialects and is not unique to Appalachia, but it is deeply embedded in mountain speech and is one of the features that outsiders most frequently cite (and ridicule) as evidence of linguistic deficiency.

Vocabulary. Appalachian English preserves a significant number of words and expressions that have fallen out of use in other American dialects:

• "Holler" (hollow — a small valley)
• "Poke" (a bag or sack, from Scots/Northern English "poke")
• "Pert' near" (pretty nearly, almost)
• "Yonder" (over there, at a distance)
• "Airish" (chilly, breezy)
• "Sigogglin" (crooked, out of alignment)
• "Jasper" (an outsider, a stranger)
• "Gaum" (to smear, to make a mess)
• "Booger" (a ghost, a frightening creature; from "boggart")
• "Redding up" (cleaning, tidying — from Scots "redd")

These are not corruptions of Standard English. They are legitimate English words — many of them older than the "standard" words that replaced them in mainstream American speech. "Poke" for bag is directly from Scots English. "Redd up" is Scots. "Booger" from "boggart" is northern English. The Appalachian vocabulary is a living museum of the English language's history — not because it has been frozen in time (a myth we will address below) but because certain forms were preserved in the relative isolation of mountain communities while they were replaced elsewhere.

The Origins: Where This Speech Came From

The Scots-Irish Foundation

The dominant linguistic influence on Appalachian English came from the Scots-Irish (or Ulster Scots) settlers who poured into the mountains in the eighteenth century. These were people whose ancestors had moved from the Scottish Lowlands and the English-Scottish border region to the plantation settlements of Ulster (northern Ireland) in the seventeenth century, and then moved again to the American colonies in the eighteenth century.

They brought with them a variety of English — Scots English, influenced by Northern English dialects and by contact with Irish Gaelic — that was already distinct from the Standard Southern English spoken in London. Many of the features that now mark Appalachian English as "different" are directly traceable to this Scots-Irish linguistic inheritance:

• Double modals ("might could") are a feature of Scots English
• A-prefixing is attested in Middle and Early Modern English, including Scots and northern dialects
• R-retention is standard in Scots English
• Many Appalachian vocabulary items (poke, redd up, booger) are Scots or northern English
• Certain pronunciation features (the "ow" sound in words like "down" or "house," which in some Appalachian communities sounds more like "doon" or "hoose") echo Scots pronunciation

The Scots-Irish influence was reinforced by the settlement patterns described in Chapter 5: the Scots-Irish moved down the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania into the Valley of Virginia and then into the mountains, establishing themselves in communities that were relatively isolated from the speech patterns of the coastal South and the mid-Atlantic cities. This isolation allowed the Scots-Irish linguistic features to persist and develop, relatively undisturbed by the standardizing influences that homogenized speech in more connected areas.

Other Influences

The Scots-Irish were not the only linguistic contributors. German settlers in the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent areas contributed some vocabulary and pronunciation features. The word "smearcase" for cottage cheese, used in parts of the Appalachian region, derives from German Schmierkäse. "Snits" for dried apple slices comes from German Schnitz. The German influence was most concentrated in the Great Valley and diminished as one moved west into the plateau country, where Scots-Irish settlement predominated.

English settlers from different regions of England brought their own dialects. Features that are sometimes attributed exclusively to Scots-Irish influence may in some cases have been reinforced by similar features in the Northern English dialects of Yorkshire, Lancashire, and the English Midlands, from which many settlers also came. The linguistic archaeology of untangling which features came from which specific source is complex, and in many cases, the honest answer is that multiple source dialects contributed the same feature independently.

And — critically and often overlooked — the African Americans who lived in the mountains from the earliest period contributed linguistic features that are difficult to disentangle from the broader Appalachian speech pattern because the languages have been in contact for so long. In the coalfield communities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, where Black and white workers lived and worked in close proximity, the linguistic exchange was constant and mutual. Features that are shared between Appalachian English and African American Vernacular English — certain phonological patterns, some grammatical constructions, elements of vocabulary — reflect this long history of contact, and attributing them to one tradition or the other is sometimes impossible.

Indigenous languages, particularly Cherokee, contributed place names that are so deeply embedded in the landscape that most speakers do not recognize them as Indigenous: Tennessee (from a Cherokee town name), Appalachian (probably from the Apalachee people), Kanawha, Shenandoah, Clinch, Watauga. Some Cherokee vocabulary entered mountain English through contact — words for plants, animals, and landscape features that had no English equivalent. But the direct structural influence of Indigenous languages on Appalachian English grammar and phonology was less extensive than the influence of the European and African languages that dominated the settlement population.

The Elizabethan English Myth: What Is True and What Is Not

The Claim

One of the most persistent claims about Appalachian English is that it is "Elizabethan English" — that mountain speech preserves the English of Shakespeare's era, frozen in the linguistic amber of mountain isolation. This claim has been repeated in newspaper articles, television programs, and popular books about Appalachia for over a century. It is a flattering claim: instead of being ignorant people who speak "bad English," Appalachian people are the guardians of the original, authentic English, preserved from the corruptions of modernity.

The claim is appealing. It is also, in its strongest form, wrong.

What Is True

It is true that Appalachian English preserves some archaic features — words, pronunciations, and grammatical constructions that were common in earlier stages of English and have since disappeared from most other dialects. The a-prefix, some vocabulary items, certain pronunciation patterns, and some grammatical structures are attested in English texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The preservation of these features is real and is a consequence of the relative isolation of mountain communities from the standardizing pressures that transformed speech in more connected areas.

What Is Not True

But the claim that Appalachian English is "Elizabethan English" — that it is the actual speech of Shakespeare's time, preserved unchanged — is linguistically inaccurate for several reasons.

First, Appalachian English has continued to change and develop over the centuries. No living language is frozen. The speech of a modern Appalachian community is not the speech of that community in 1800, much less in 1600. New words have been adopted, old words have shifted in meaning, pronunciation has evolved, and grammatical structures have been modified. Appalachian English is a living dialect, not a museum exhibit.

Second, the features of Appalachian English do not correspond exclusively or even primarily to the English of Shakespeare's specific era (late sixteenth century). They correspond to a much broader range of historical English — to Scots English, to northern English dialects, to Early Modern English more generally. Some features are indeed sixteenth-century survivals. Others are eighteenth-century or even nineteenth-century developments. The label "Elizabethan" is a romantic oversimplification.

Third, the Elizabethan English myth, however well-intentioned, can function as a different kind of condescension. It implies that the value of Appalachian speech lies in its antiquity — in its connection to a prestigious literary past — rather than in its present reality as a living, creative, evolving language system. Appalachian English does not need to be Shakespeare's English to be worthy of respect. It is worthy of respect because it is a legitimate dialect spoken by millions of people, carrying centuries of cultural meaning. The attempt to validate it by connecting it to Shakespeare is, paradoxically, another form of the belief that Appalachian speech needs external validation to have value.

What Should Be Said Instead

The honest claim is this: Appalachian English preserves some features of earlier stages of English, particularly features associated with the Scots-Irish and northern English dialects spoken by the majority of the region's settlers. These features are interesting, historically significant, and linguistically legitimate. But Appalachian English is not a fossil. It is alive. And like all living things, it has changed, adapted, and grown over the centuries it has been spoken in these mountains.

Accent as Class Marker: The Hierarchy of American Speech

The Moment of Judgment

In the United States, accent is one of the most powerful class markers available. The moment you speak, the person listening to you makes a set of rapid, largely unconscious judgments about your intelligence, your education, your social class, your trustworthiness, and your competence. These judgments are not based on the content of your speech — on what you actually said — but on how you said it. The accent does the sorting.

Studies in sociolinguistics — the branch of linguistics that examines the social dimensions of language — have consistently demonstrated that American listeners associate Appalachian speech with lower intelligence, lower educational attainment, lower socioeconomic status, and lower professional competence. These associations are not based on any real correlation between accent and ability. They are based on cultural stereotypes that have been constructed and reinforced over more than a century.

The effect is measurable. In experimental studies where listeners are asked to evaluate speakers saying the same words in different accents, Appalachian-accented speakers are consistently rated as less intelligent, less educated, and less suitable for professional positions than speakers with Standard American English accents. The ratings do not change when the content of the speech is identical. The accent alone triggers the negative evaluation.

This is linguistic discrimination — prejudice based on how a person speaks rather than on what they say or what they can do. And it is, as sociolinguist Walt Wolfram and others have argued, one of the last socially acceptable forms of discrimination in American life.

The Last Acceptable Prejudice

Consider the paradox. In contemporary American culture, it is considered unacceptable to make derogatory statements about a person's race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or physical disability. Legal protections exist against discrimination on these grounds. Social norms condemn such prejudice, even when the norms are imperfectly enforced.

But it is perfectly acceptable — in popular media, in professional settings, in everyday conversation — to mock how Appalachian people talk. Comedians do imitations. Television shows feature Appalachian accents as shorthand for ignorance. Job interviewers make hiring decisions based partly on accent. Teachers correct children's "grammar" when what they are actually correcting is their dialect. And the people who engage in this mockery would be horrified to be told that they are doing exactly what they would condemn if it were directed at any other group.

The comedian who would never mock African American Vernacular English — understanding that to do so would be racist — will mock Appalachian English without a second thought. The employer who would never reject a candidate for having a Spanish accent will reject a candidate for having a mountain accent without recognizing the parallel. The teacher who has been trained to respect linguistic diversity in the context of racial and ethnic dialects will tell an Appalachian child that their speech is "wrong" without realizing that they are doing the same thing.

This is possible because American culture has not yet recognized linguistic discrimination against Appalachian speakers as a form of prejudice analogous to other forms of discrimination. The Appalachian accent is still fair game. And the consequences for the people who speak it are real and measurable: lower ratings in job interviews, reduced access to professional opportunities, diminished credibility in educational and legal settings, and the corrosive psychological effect of being told, repeatedly and from childhood, that the way you naturally speak is wrong.

The Evidence: What the Studies Show

The claim that Appalachian accents trigger negative evaluations is not anecdotal. It is supported by a substantial body of experimental research in sociolinguistics and social psychology.

In a classic matched-guise study — a technique in which the same speaker records the same text in two or more accents, and listeners evaluate the recordings without knowing they are hearing the same person — listeners consistently rate Appalachian-accented speech lower on measures of intelligence, education, competence, and professional suitability. The effect holds even when the content of the speech is identical. It holds when the listeners are themselves from Appalachian backgrounds. It holds when the listeners are explicitly instructed to evaluate only the content of what is said, not how it is said.

Dennis Preston's perceptual dialectology research — in which Americans are asked to draw maps showing where they believe "correct" and "incorrect" English is spoken — consistently identifies the Appalachian and Southern regions as the areas where Americans believe the "worst" English is spoken. Northern Midwestern speech (particularly that of Michigan, Minnesota, and Iowa) is consistently rated as the "best" or "most correct," despite having no greater linguistic validity than any other variety. The ratings reflect not linguistic reality but the geographic distribution of social prestige: the dialects rated "best" are spoken in regions associated with education and economic power; the dialects rated "worst" are spoken in regions associated with poverty and marginalization.

The practical consequences extend into every sphere of public life. In legal settings, research has shown that witnesses and defendants who speak with stigmatized accents are perceived as less credible than those who speak Standard American English — a bias that can affect jury deliberations and case outcomes. In healthcare, providers have been documented communicating differently with patients who have stigmatized accents, providing less information and making more negative assumptions about health literacy. In housing, accent-based discrimination has been documented in rental markets, where landlords respond differently to inquiries based on the caller's accent.

The cumulative weight of this evidence makes an overwhelming case: accent-based discrimination against Appalachian speakers is real, systematic, and consequential. It is not a matter of individual rudeness or isolated incidents. It is a structural feature of American social life, embedded in institutions, reproduced through media, and reinforced by an educational system that treats one dialect as correct and all others as deficient.

The Educational System and Mountain Speech

"That Is Not How We Say It"

The institution that has done the most damage to the self-esteem of Appalachian speakers is, tragically, the institution that should have been their greatest ally: the school.

For generations, teachers in Appalachian schools — many of them well-meaning, many of them themselves from the mountains — have told children that their natural speech is wrong. "We don't say 'ain't.'" "We don't say 'might could.'" "We don't say 'a-hunting.'" "We say 'going to,' not 'fixin' to.'" The corrections are presented as grammar instruction, but they are not teaching grammar. They are teaching a child to replace one grammatically correct system (their native dialect) with another grammatically correct system (Standard American English) while being told that their native system is incorrect.

The distinction matters enormously. There is nothing wrong with teaching children to use Standard American English in addition to their native dialect. The ability to use Standard American English is a practical skill with real economic value in a society that rewards it. But teaching Standard American English as an addition — "here is another way to say this, and it's useful to know" — is fundamentally different from teaching it as a correction — "the way you say it is wrong, and you must stop saying it that way."

The correction approach does not just teach Standard American English. It teaches language shame — the internalized belief that your natural way of speaking is inferior, that the language of your family and community is deficient, that something fundamental about who you are is wrong. Language shame is psychologically damaging in ways that are difficult to overstate. It attacks the most intimate dimension of identity — the speech patterns you absorbed from your parents before you were old enough to choose them — and tells you that this intimate, foundational part of yourself is a defect to be overcome.

Primary Source Excerpt — Oral history interview, former student, Mingo County, West Virginia (1994): "I remember Miss Henderson — second grade — she told me I talked like a hillbilly and I needed to learn to talk right if I wanted to be somebody. I was seven years old. I went home and cried. I didn't understand what I was doing wrong. I was just talking the way my daddy talked, the way my mamaw talked, the way everybody I'd ever known talked. And she was telling me all of it was wrong."

The damage extends beyond individual self-esteem. When an educational system systematically devalues a community's language, it devalues the community. It sends the message that the people in this community — the parents, the grandparents, the neighbors — are themselves deficient. The child who is told that their family's speech is wrong is being told, implicitly, that their family is wrong. And the child who internalizes this message may come to see education itself as something that requires leaving — not just the mountains but everything the mountains represent, including the people who speak the way they have always spoken.

Code-Switching: Living Between Two Languages

The Necessary Performance

Code-switching — the practice of shifting between two or more languages or dialects depending on the social context — is one of the most important and most psychologically complex aspects of the Appalachian linguistic experience.

Virtually every Appalachian person who has operated in professional, educational, or urban settings has engaged in code-switching: speaking one way at home and another way at work, one way with family and another way with strangers, one way in the holler and another way in the interview room. The switch is not always conscious. For many people, it has become automatic — a practiced performance so thoroughly internalized that it feels natural, even though it is not.

Code-switching is a survival strategy. The Appalachian professional who code-switches in the office is not being inauthentic. They are navigating a social environment that would penalize them for speaking naturally — an environment in which their native dialect would trigger the negative evaluations described above. The choice to code-switch is rational. But it comes at a cost.

Case Study 2 examines code-switching in depth, but the essential dynamics can be stated here. Every code-switch is a small act of self-erasure. It says: the real way I talk is not acceptable here. The person I am at home is not the person I can be in this room. My authenticity is a liability. Each switch is individually trivial. Cumulatively, across a career, across a lifetime, the psychological weight of constantly monitoring and modifying your speech — of never being fully yourself in any professional setting — is significant.

The burden falls disproportionately on people who come from stigmatized dialect backgrounds. A person who grew up speaking Standard American English does not need to code-switch. Their natural speech is the prestige dialect. They can be themselves in any room. The Appalachian speaker cannot. The asymmetry is itself a form of inequality — a hidden tax on people from mountain communities that is never named but always collected.

Walt Wolfram and the Science of Appalachian Speech

Walt Wolfram, a sociolinguist at North Carolina State University, has spent decades studying the dialects of the American South and Appalachia with a combination of scientific rigor and genuine respect for the communities he studies. His work, more than any other single body of research, has established the linguistic legitimacy of Appalachian English and documented the systematic, rule-governed nature of its features.

Wolfram's research has demonstrated that Appalachian English is not a degraded or simplified version of Standard American English but a distinct dialect with its own internal logic. His studies of a-prefixing, for example, have shown that the feature follows precise grammatical rules — rules that Appalachian speakers apply consistently and unconsciously, just as speakers of any dialect apply the rules of their native speech.

Wolfram has also been a pioneer in what he calls "sociolinguistic gratuity" — the principle that linguists who study a community have an obligation to give something back. His outreach programs have included dialect awareness curricula for schools, public lectures, documentaries, and community-engaged research projects designed to help Appalachian communities understand and take pride in their linguistic heritage.

The broader field of sociolinguistics overwhelmingly supports Wolfram's conclusions. The consensus among linguists is clear: Appalachian English is a legitimate, historically grounded, rule-governed dialect that deserves the same respect accorded to any other variety of English. The stigma attached to it is a social phenomenon, not a linguistic one. The problem is not how Appalachian people speak. The problem is how other people react to it.

The Diversity Within: Black Appalachian English and Other Voices

The discussion of Appalachian English so far has focused primarily on the speech patterns of white mountain communities. But the linguistic landscape of Appalachia has always been more diverse than this focus suggests, and understanding that diversity is essential to a complete picture.

Black Appalachian English occupies a complex position at the intersection of two stigmatized dialect traditions. Black Appalachians speak a variety of English that shares features with both the broader Appalachian dialect (a-prefixing, double modals, certain vocabulary items) and with African American Vernacular English (distinctive grammatical features, phonological patterns, and vocabulary). The degree of overlap varies by community, generation, and individual. In some coalfield communities where Black and white families lived in close proximity for generations, the speech patterns converged significantly. In other areas, clearer distinctions persisted.

The sociolinguistic situation of Black Appalachian speakers is doubly burdensome: they face the stigma attached to Appalachian speech and the stigma attached to Black speech, a compounded discrimination that is rarely acknowledged in discussions of either dialect. Frank X Walker's coinage of the term "Affrilachian" was, among other things, a linguistic act — an insistence that Black Appalachian identity was real and distinct, and that the language in which that identity was expressed deserved recognition.

The immigrant languages of the coalfields — Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Welsh, and others — left traces in the Appalachian linguistic landscape that linguists have only begun to document. In communities like Lynch, Kentucky (where U.S. Steel imported workers from across Europe and the American South), the linguistic environment of the early twentieth century was a babel of languages and dialects. English was the common tongue, but it was an English inflected by dozens of other languages, and some of those inflections persisted in local speech patterns long after the immigrant languages themselves had ceased to be spoken.

Cherokee and other Indigenous languages represent the oldest linguistic layer in the Appalachian region. The Cherokee language, part of the Iroquoian language family, is still spoken by members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in western North Carolina, though the number of fluent speakers has declined sharply. Efforts to revitalize Cherokee language use — through immersion schools, community programs, and digital resources — are among the most important language preservation initiatives in the region. The relationship between Cherokee language revitalization and the preservation of Appalachian English raises parallel questions about the value of linguistic diversity and the costs of its loss.

Dialect Leveling: The Slow Erasure

When Everyone Starts Sounding the Same

Dialect leveling — the process by which regional dialects become more similar to each other over time, typically converging toward a standard variety — is a well-documented phenomenon in modern linguistics, and it is happening to Appalachian English.

The forces driving dialect leveling are the same forces that have transformed every other aspect of mountain life: improved transportation, mass media, migration, urbanization, and the integration of mountain communities into the broader national economy and culture. When mountain people watch the same television programs, listen to the same music, attend the same universities, and work in the same national labor markets as people from other regions, their speech patterns are exposed to standardizing pressures that erode regional distinctiveness.

Young Appalachian speakers today use fewer traditional dialect features than their grandparents. A-prefixing is declining. Some traditional vocabulary items ("poke," "airish," "sigogglin") are disappearing. Pronunciation is shifting toward Standard American English norms, particularly among educated, mobile, younger speakers.

This is not a simple story of loss. Dialect leveling is a natural process that occurs whenever language communities come into closer contact. It does not happen because people are forced to change their speech (though that happens too). It happens because people naturally accommodate to the speech patterns of those around them, and in a more connected world, "those around them" includes people from a much wider range of linguistic backgrounds than was the case when mountain communities were relatively isolated.

But the loss of dialectal distinctiveness is a loss nonetheless. When traditional Appalachian speech features disappear, something irreplaceable goes with them — not just words and sounds, but the cultural meanings, the social associations, the centuries of history embedded in a way of speaking that developed in a specific place among a specific people.

The Generational Divide

The generational dimension of dialect leveling is particularly striking. In many Appalachian families, you can hear the history of the dialect in the span of three generations.

The grandmother, born in the 1930s or 1940s, speaks a variety of Appalachian English that is richly traditional: a-prefixing is natural, double modals are frequent, the vocabulary is full of words that a younger person might not recognize. Her speech is the most direct link to the Scots-Irish and early American English patterns that shaped the dialect.

Her daughter, born in the 1960s or 1970s, speaks a modified version — still recognizably Appalachian but with fewer traditional features. She may use a-prefixing in storytelling but not in everyday conversation. She may know the old vocabulary but use it only with family. She is a code-switcher, moving between her home dialect and the Standard American English she uses at work.

Her granddaughter, born in the 2000s, may speak what is essentially Standard American English with a few Appalachian features — a slight accent, an occasional "fixin' to," the remnants of a dialect she never fully acquired because the conditions that sustained it — isolation, community cohesion, intergenerational transmission — have eroded.

This three-generation arc is not universal. In some communities, particularly in the most remote areas, traditional speech persists more strongly. In other communities, particularly those closest to urban centers, the leveling is more advanced. But the general pattern — a steady erosion of distinctive features across generations — is widespread enough to be considered a defining trend in the contemporary linguistic landscape of the region.

Primary Source Excerpt — Oral history interview, Pike County, Kentucky (2008): "My grandchildren don't talk like me. They don't even talk like their mother. They sound like everybody on TV. And I know that's probably good for them — they won't get laughed at the way I was. But sometimes I listen to them and I think, something is being lost. The way we talked, it was part of who we were. And when you lose the way you talk, you lose a piece of yourself."

Language Preservation Efforts

The recognition that Appalachian English is disappearing has prompted a growing movement to document, celebrate, and preserve the dialect.

Dialect awareness programs in schools — inspired in part by Walt Wolfram's work — teach students about the history and structure of their own speech, helping them understand that their dialect is not a deficiency but a heritage. These programs do not discourage students from learning Standard American English (the practical necessity of which is not denied). They add to Standard American English instruction a dimension of linguistic understanding that says: your home speech is not wrong. It is different. It has a history. It follows rules. It is part of who you are.

Oral history projects — including the Appalachian Oral History Project at Alice Lloyd College, the Foxfire archives, and numerous local and regional projects — have preserved recordings of traditional Appalachian speech that are invaluable to linguists and historians. These recordings capture not just the words but the rhythms, intonations, and inflections that written transcription cannot convey.

Literature and media by Appalachian writers and artists increasingly celebrate mountain speech rather than apologizing for it. Novelists like Silas House, Crystal Wilkinson, and Ron Rash write dialogue that honors the cadences and vocabulary of Appalachian English. The Appalshop media collective in Whitesburg, Kentucky produces films and radio programming in which mountain speech is heard as a natural, unmediated voice rather than a subject of anthropological curiosity.

These efforts are important. They are also, in the face of dialect leveling, fighting against the current. The question is not whether Appalachian English will survive — it will, in some form, for the foreseeable future. The question is whether the features that make it distinctive will persist, or whether it will gradually converge with the standard dialect until the distinctiveness is gone.

Appalachian English and the Anchor Communities

The four anchor communities of this textbook illustrate how Appalachian English varies even within the region — a reminder that "Appalachian English" is itself a simplification of a complex dialect landscape.

In Harlan County, Kentucky, the deep eastern Kentucky dialect remains among the most conservative in the region. Features like a-prefixing, double modals, and distinctive vocabulary persist more strongly here than in communities closer to urban centers. The isolation that defined the coalfield communities — the narrow hollers, the limited transportation routes, the company towns that were worlds unto themselves — sustained linguistic distinctiveness long after other areas began to standardize. But even here, the speech of young people is measurably different from the speech of their grandparents, and the trajectory is toward convergence.

In the New River Valley, Virginia, the presence of Virginia Tech and the relatively diversified economy have accelerated dialect leveling. The New River Valley is Appalachian by every geographic and cultural measure, but its speech patterns have been influenced by the university community, by the military installations in the broader region, and by the commuter economy that connects the valley to Roanoke and beyond. A college student in Blacksburg in 2020 might speak with only the faintest trace of the Appalachian features that characterized the area's speech a generation earlier.

In McDowell County, West Virginia, the massive out-migration that followed the coal economy's collapse carried Appalachian speech patterns into the cities of the Midwest and the upper South — Columbus, Detroit, Cleveland, Baltimore — where they encountered new linguistic environments. The Appalachian diaspora created "Appalachian English" communities outside the mountains, and the speech patterns that migrants carried with them evolved differently in their new settings than they did in the communities they left behind. The dialect of Appalachian Cincinnati is not the same as the dialect of contemporary McDowell County, even though both trace their roots to the same source.

In Asheville, North Carolina, the tourism and remote-work economies have brought a flood of newcomers whose speech patterns are overwhelmingly Standard American English. The resulting linguistic environment accelerates dialect leveling through simple arithmetic: when the majority of the people you interact with speak Standard American English, your own speech adapts. Longtime Asheville residents sometimes note, with a mixture of pride and sadness, that "you can't hardly hear it anymore" — that the mountain accent that once defined the city's soundscape is disappearing under the linguistic weight of in-migration.

Appalachian English in Literature and Media

Writing Mountain Speech

The challenge of representing Appalachian English in written form has produced some of the most interesting — and most contested — decisions in American literature.

Writers who attempt to render Appalachian speech on the page face a dilemma. If they use eye dialect — nonstandard spellings designed to visually represent dialectal pronunciation ("sez" for "says," "wuz" for "was," "kin" for "can") — they risk making their characters appear ignorant, because American readers have been trained to associate nonstandard spelling with illiteracy. Eye dialect can become a tool of condescension even when the writer intends respect. The character who "sez" things on the page is marked as different, as other, as requiring translation — even when the pronunciation being represented is no more "nonstandard" than the pronunciation of the readers themselves.

The best Appalachian writers have found ways to evoke mountain speech without relying heavily on eye dialect. James Still, in River of Earth (1940), captures the rhythms and vocabulary of eastern Kentucky speech through sentence structure, word choice, and pacing rather than through phonetic spelling. Lee Smith, in novels like Oral History (1983) and Fair and Tender Ladies (1988), uses the cadences and vocabulary of mountain speech to create voices that feel authentic without condescending. Silas House, in Clay's Quilt (2001) and subsequent novels, writes dialogue that sounds like eastern Kentucky because it is eastern Kentucky — the product of a writer who grew up hearing these voices and knows them from the inside.

The Affrilachian Poets — the group of Black Appalachian writers led by Frank X Walker (who coined the term "Affrilachian" in the 1990s) — have brought additional dimensions to the literary representation of mountain speech, incorporating African American linguistic traditions alongside the broader Appalachian dialect in ways that challenge the assumption that Appalachian English is exclusively white.

Television and Film

In popular media, Appalachian accents have been used overwhelmingly as markers of ignorance, danger, or comedy. From The Beverly Hillbillies (1962-1971) through Deliverance (1972) through Wrong Turn (2003) and beyond, the Appalachian accent in American film and television signals to the audience that they are in the presence of someone who is either laughable or threatening — and frequently both.

The rare exceptions prove the rule. Coal Miner's Daughter (1980), with Sissy Spacek's careful rendering of Loretta Lynn's Kentucky speech, treated the accent with respect. Winter's Bone (2010) presented Ozark mountain speech as natural and unexotic. But these are exceptions in a media landscape that overwhelmingly uses Appalachian speech as a shorthand for the primitive and the dangerous.

The damage extends beyond representation. When the only Appalachian accents you hear in popular media are attached to characters who are ignorant, violent, or absurd, the accent itself becomes contaminated by those associations. Listeners who have no direct experience with Appalachian communities form their impressions from media representations, and the impressions are overwhelmingly negative. The media does not just reflect prejudice; it creates and reinforces it.

The Paradox

The deepest irony of the politics of Appalachian speech is this: the people who mock it are engaging in exactly the kind of prejudice they would condemn if it were directed at any other group.

The progressive urban professional who would never mock African American Vernacular English — who understands that such mockery is racist — will mock Appalachian English without hesitation. The diversity trainer who teaches employees to respect cultural differences will laugh at a coworker's mountain accent. The academic who publishes papers on the importance of linguistic diversity will unconsciously devalue a job candidate who says "might could."

The inconsistency is not an oversight. It reflects a specific hierarchy of acceptable prejudice in American culture. Appalachian people — because they are mostly white, because they are mostly rural, because they are associated with the working class and with political conservatism — are not protected by the social norms that protect other marginalized groups from linguistic discrimination. Their accent is fair game because they are fair game, and they are fair game because the cultural system that produces prejudice has decided that their particular form of marginalization does not count.

Understanding this is not about claiming that Appalachian people are more oppressed than other groups. It is about recognizing that linguistic discrimination is a real phenomenon with real consequences, that it affects Appalachian speakers in measurable and harmful ways, and that the people who practice it should, if they are honest, recognize it as the same kind of prejudice they condemn in other contexts.

Community History Portfolio: Checkpoint

Chapter 31 Checkpoint — Cultural Portrait (Language and Dialect):

For your selected county, investigate the linguistic landscape:

1. Dialect features: What dialect features are (or were) characteristic of speech in your county? Are there local vocabulary items, pronunciations, or grammatical features that distinguish local speech from Standard American English?
2. Language attitudes: Can you find evidence (in oral histories, newspaper articles, or personal accounts) of how people in your county felt about their own speech? Is there evidence of language shame, language pride, or both?
3. Education and language: How has the educational system in your county related to local speech patterns? Were children corrected for using dialect features? Were there dialect awareness programs?
4. Change over time: Has the speech of your county changed during the lifetimes of the people you can interview or find records from? What forces (media, migration, education, economic change) have driven any changes?
5. Primary source: Record (with permission) a brief sample of local speech — from an elderly relative, a community member, or an archival recording — and write a 200-word analysis of what linguistic features you observe and what they reveal about the community's linguistic heritage.

This checkpoint should be approximately 800-1,200 words and will be incorporated into the cultural portrait section of your final portfolio.

Chapter Summary

Appalachian English is not bad English. It is not lazy English. It is not the English of people who were too isolated or too ignorant to learn "proper" speech. It is a legitimate dialect with deep historical roots in the Scots-Irish, northern English, and broader settlement-era English traditions that the region's earliest European inhabitants brought with them. Its features — a-prefixing, double modals, r-retention, distinctive vocabulary — follow systematic rules and carry specific meanings. The myth that Appalachian English is "Elizabethan English" is flattering but inaccurate; what is true is that the dialect preserves some archaic features alongside many innovations of its own. The stigma attached to Appalachian speech is a social construction, not a linguistic reality, and it functions as one of the last socially acceptable forms of prejudice in American life — a prejudice with measurable consequences in education, employment, and self-esteem. The Appalachian person who code-switches in the office, the child who is told their family's speech is wrong, the job applicant who is dismissed before they finish their first sentence — these are people paying a tax for being from the mountains. That tax is unjust. And the first step toward ending it is understanding what Appalachian English actually is: not a failure, but a language.