Mountain Folks

One of the first things we notice about people is the way they talk. We don’t all have the same speaking voice, especially where I was born and raised. I never thought I talked differently at all, I just thought that was the way the words were supposed to sound. I have always said ‘yall’ and ‘reckon’, it was the way I was raised and I never thought twice about it until someone made fun of me in school one day for my ‘southern accent’. I was born and raised in the Shenandoah Valley and had lived there my whole life. How was it possible that I talked differently from the same people I had grown up with? When I would tell people I had lived here all my life and didn’t think I talked any differently than any of the rest of them, they would argue that I did. People in my classes used to tell me I talked like I was from Georgia or somewhere in the Deep South. I do admit that I draw out some of my vowels a bit and would such as ‘tiger’ and ‘five’ are pronounced with long ‘I’ sounds but that is about the only difference I have noticed. When I try to explain that to my peers, they look at me and laugh and tell me that I sound way more country than most of the people they have met from the area so I guess ill never be able to win that argument. I even asked my family if they think the way I talk sounds different from anyone else. Most of them say no, and that I pronounce my words just like the rest of them, but others that don’t see me very much tell me I have a little twang to my voice. My dad says that if that’s true he has no idea where it came from, but I think that is because it might have come from him!

It wasn’t until recently that I discovered I speak with a different dialect of English than many other people that live near by. It’s called Appalachian English, and some of the words were derived from how Irish settlers spoke, and many new words were formed by mountain folk and just drifted up through the mountains with travelers. When I began to do some research on the different way of talking, I noticed that I used a lot of the same vocabulary as the mountain folk, as did the rest of my family. I am not the only one that has been asked “Hey where are you from?”. My brother got it a lot when he went down to North Carolina for school. They tend to speak the same way down there but with a little different of an accent on the words. I found it funny when my brother called and told me that someone asked him where he came from, because he hardly ever got asked in high school, unlike me. However, as soon as he traveled a little bit, people began to wonder. As a result of him going to school in a more southern state, he came back with some new phrases that I had to think about to understand what they meant so I reckon they had some mountain folk down there too!

YouTube has a video about Appalachian English and the old timers that are very fluent in speaking it. Some say that the dialect is inferior and that the people that speak ‘mountain’ are just lazy and lack the intelligence to speak properly. I don’t think it is inferior at all. We talk this way because we were raised this way and we can’t help if we sound a little more country than others. I don’t make fun of how people up north talk. Yes, it may be irritating at times with the spin they put on the words, but I keep those thought to myself. However, some people have no problem telling others what they think about them. In the video, the person interviews these little old back woods men and women and ask them how they way certain phrases and what those phrases mean. A lot of the words they use are made up but everyone in the community understands how they are used. ‘Si-gogglin’ for example means that something is built crooked and looks awful. For people that weren’t generally liked very well, they were nicknamed ‘peckerwoods’. Lots of older women called traveling salesmen this term. On the other hand, people that no one knew but looked like they had the potential to be very nice were called ‘jaspers’. If the folks didn’t know your name, but you appeared that you may be a nice character, they tried to be a little more respectful with the words they used toward you! The word ‘plumb’ came to be a replacement for the phrase ‘all the way’. For example, instead of saying all the way worn out, they would say plumb worn out. I use that one a lot myself, just because I grew up with my dad using it all the time and it just stuck.

Simple words that everyone uses today had a little bit of a different pronunciation towards the end of the word. For example, flour for some people is pronounced ‘fl-our’, but for mountain talk it is pronounced ‘fl-hour’ with the ‘our’ drawn out. We also generalize certain things such as soda. Whether it is Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, or Coca-Cola, we call it coke. A lot of the English we use is grammatically incorrect but most people are still able to understand it. For example, instead of saying I saw you the other day at the grocery store, we say, I seen ya the other day at the grocery store. Many of the phrases we use different verb tenses but we mean the same thing and most outsiders can still understand what is being said as long as it inst too extreme. I have learned to tell people that make fun of the way I talk that I am proud of where I am from and that is just the way I was raised.