Appalachian English Vocabulary Variants

bubba   Tue Nov 15, 2005 5:08 pm GMT
Being a person interested in languages and dialects, and having grown up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of NC, I'm curious to know if anyone else has devoted energy to studying the peculiarities of Appalachian regional speech. Having grown up with one parent who spoke quite good, almost 'textbook' English, and the other with a strong regional influence, I began to notice how much different our regional speech was from the standard English I learned in school.

As I learned other languages and traveled, I came to see that the speech of my native region is so significantly different from the standard that a person from another part of the U.S. would be hard-pressed to follow a conversation between two locals speaking as they normally would with each other. While the influence of TV and other media on culture has led to many younger people dropping the supposedly 'uncultured' local speech patterns, I still see a great many youth whose speech is distinctly 'mountain talk'.

I also see a strong distinction between the 'Southern accent' in English and the strong differences in vocabulary and pronunciation that set our local speech apart from that of the textbooks and TV announcers.

A few quick examples from local speech:

Use of the form "y'uns" and "yornses" for the second person plural pronoun and its possessive;
Words like "remption"/"boocoos" (large amounts of something);
"sygoglin'" (not plumb or square); "allow" used to describe speech
or expression; pronunciation of "body" as "BY-dee" and poison as "PY-zun", etc.
Brennus   Tue Nov 15, 2005 11:18 pm GMT
"y'uns" and "yornses" - Many linguists attribute these words to a Scotch-Irish influence.

Victuals for "food" and varmint for "small wild animal" are also associated with hilbilly speech just about everywhere in the Appalachians. They are apparently archaic English words dating back to Chaucer's time.

Comic strips from the 1950's and 60's like "Snuffy Smith" and the old "Gasoline Alley" used to have lots of hilbilly language gems in them but unfortuantely they're gone now.
Trawick   Wed Nov 16, 2005 2:32 pm GMT
"y'uns" and "yornses" - Many linguists attribute these words to a Scotch-Irish influence."

As is the common Southern "y'all" which spread throughout much of the region.