Source: Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (1989) p. 439.

Mountain Language

Mountain English is a broad term covering the varieties of English spoken in two geographically separate mountainous areas of the United Statesóthe Ozark region of northwestern Arkansas and southern Missouri, and the southern Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky and Tennessee, mid-to-southern West Virginia, western Virginia and North Carolina, and northern Georgia. The separate terms Ozark English and Appalachian English denote the language of the two regions.

Mountain English has long been the object of much curiosity. Outsiders often comment on its old-fashioned flavor and its colorful figures of speech. Early study of it was limited to the search for relic usages and pronunciations. Mountain speech has often been romanticized and stereotyped as Elizabethan or Shakespearean, terms that connote a language frozen in time from the late 17th and early 18th centuries, when emigrants from the British Isles first settled in southern Appalachia.

Some speakers of Mountain English still use the pronouns hit and we'uns. But Mountain English is, in fact, no more frozen than any other variety of American English; all varieties retain archaisms, as well as exhibit features in various stages of change. Speakers of Mountain English tend to use certain linguistic featuresósome archaic and some innovativeóto provide social and regional identity and the cultural cohesion to bind them as a group. This is the way dialects work. The specific features are not absolute; it is their frequency of use that characterizes the group. In other words, an old-time resident of Hazard, Ky., may not use the archaic form done to emphasize a completed action every time it might "fit" into her speech, but she probably says They done got married or He done made me forget, or some such phrase, more often than a native-born resident of, say, New Harmony, Ind. The higher frequency of use of features like done distinguishes Mountain English from other varieties of American English.

Another archaism that occurs with a degree of regularity in Mountain English is the a- prefix, which intensifies a continuous act-ion, as in He was a-tellin' the truth. Both the a- prefix and completive done were used in the early history of English and still survive in mountain speech. Interestingly, both forms seem to be dying out in the Ozarks, with little evidence of their use by younger generations. The a- prefix occurs with less frequency among younger speakers of Appalachian English as well, but completive done is holding its own.

Innovation, or language change, seems to be occurring in two specific grammatical areas of Mountain English: subject-verb concord and the marking of principal parts of verbs. Whereas American English in general distinguishes between was and were for grammatically singular and plural subjects (having historically lost this distinction with all other past tense verbs), Mountain English speakers often eliminate the distinction, using was with plural or singular subjects. In both Appalachian English and Ozark English, the change is almost complete in constructions with the expletive there, as in There was many flowers on the grave. The same type of grammatical simplification is evident in the use of don't with third-person singular subjects, as in She don't know the truth. In present tense affirmative constructions, however, there is less evidence of simplification, with utterances like I have a teacher that explain things occurring rarely. This low frequency of -s deletion marks Ozark English and Appalachian English as distinct from other non-mainstream varieties of English that are otherwise much like them in their simplified use of was and don't.

Mountain English speakers tend to regularize the principal parts of verbs that other American speakers of English keep irregular. (Irregular verbs are those like grow [grew/grown] as distinct from those like own [owned/owned] that form the past forms with -ed.) In Mountain English, some regularized forms, such as knowed, are used for both the past tense and past participle; some irregular past tenses are also used for the past participle, as in go (went/went); and some bare root forms are generalized to both the past tense and past participle, as in give (give/give). Although other varieties of American English also show wide variation in their verb principal parts, the combination of linguistic forms within patterns of variationóforms like completive done, a- prefix, simplified subject-verb concord, and regularized verbsówork together to characterize Mountain English.

Before recent studies documented the similarities between language patterns of the Ozarks and southern Appalachians, a sameness of language and culture was assumed. Although geographically separate, the two regions share, after all, a common cultural heritage. Many of the descendants of the Scotch-Irish who settled in southern Appalachia in the 1700s moved on to northwestern Arkansas in the 1800s, when incentives in the form of free or cheap land were offered by the state to those who would homestead it. Characterized by a strong sense of place, their rural isolation, a stable social system bordering on clannishness, and a common heritage, the people of the Ozarks and southern Appalachia have maintained a singular ethnic and linguistic identity.

Linda Blanton
University of New Orleans

Lester V. Berrey, American Speech (February 1940); Linda Blanton, in Toward a Social History of American English, ed. J. L. Dillard (1985); Donna Christian, Walter Wolfram, and J. Duke, Variation and Change in Geographically Isolated Communities: Appalachian English and Ozark English (Final Report to the National Science Foundation, Grant No. BNS 8208916, 1984); Walter and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (1976), Sociolinguistic Variables in Appalachian Dialects (Final Report to the National Institute of Education, Grant No. NIE-G-740026, 1975).