Til The Cows Come Home: Also Known as a Darn Long Post About Appalachian English*
Mentone, Alabama. Photo by Kristen Tcherneshoff.
*Specifically about the Northeast Alabama variety of Smoky Mountain English, since that’s where I’m from.
I was born in Alabama and I didn’t think anything was wrong with my language. I pronounced “mountain” as “mounain” (linguistically known as consonant clutter reduction), I said “falling” as “fallin” (g-dropping from the end of infinitive verbs — see music video below from the country music GOAT), and if I pronounced the words “pen” and “pin”, well, you wouldn’t be able to tell a difference (these are known as vowel mergers). I used “y’all” as a pronoun and referred to a group of people as “all y’all”. I said “buggy” and “britches”, I called a toilet a “commode”, and although nowadays, I will say damn and shit in every type of setting, I have never in my life told someone to “shut up”.
Listen to “The Closer You Get” to hear the -g dropping. Alabama’s lyrics sing, “I’m fallin’ faster and faster and faster”. The Alabama band is from my hometown, so this is a great representation of how this works!
I was five when I learned that my English was wrong. My parents and I moved to Florida and I discovered, by the welcoming banter of my classmates, that I was a redneck, a hillbilly, that that was just uneducated “mountain talk”. I began to change my phonemes, I dropped my lengthened vowels (which led to me speaking faster, too), and I used different vocabulary. A lot of this was done consciously: at that young age I knew that I had to change things quickly to fit in and make friends.
In 2013, Katherine Kinzler and Jasmine DeJesus published “Northern = smart and Southern = nice: The development of accent attitudes in the United States”, which was a study of children’s attitudes towards accents. Children from Illinois and children from Tennessee were shown pictures of people, accompanied by a brief 3-second audio clip. The clips of speech were of either someone with a “Northern” accent or a “Southern” accent. Afterwards, the kids were asked who they would want to be friends with. The children from Illinois overwhelmingly chose the people with Northern-accented speech, whereas the kids from Tennessee had no preference.
These children were all around five or six years old, at the start of their formal education, and the study surmised that they already had preferences regarding dialects and accents. Clearly, these attitudes are learned from adults: we constantly convey our prejudices to children, without even realizing it. In part, our attitudes are developed by what we hear around us — understandably young kids from Chicago would be feel more at-home around a Northern accent. But then, why would the kids from Tennessee not wholeheartedly choose those with the Southern accents?
“The subtle attitudes we attach to accents have a profound impact on others, and on ourselves.”
And here’s where Kinzler and DeJesus’s results really hit home: when the same kids were asked if the speaker was American, the majority of children from Illinois selected the Northern speakers as American. The children from Tennessee? Same as for the other question, they had no strong preferences, both sounded American to them. The researchers suggest that children from the South see both varieties of English as home. Why? Because learning and acculturation are imposed on us through experience and what is available.
In the US, Northern dialects are often more respected and associated with education; on the opposing side, with English varieties from the South, the hillbilly stereotype is played out to extremes. Many characteristics and traits come prepackaged with this hillbilly stereotype. “Hillbillies” are considered impoverished, backwards, uneducated, and lazy. This is perpetuated by Hollywood and the media: tv shows, movies, stories, cartoons all rely heavily (albeit, offensively) on the knowledge that viewers will associate a Southern accent with a lack of intelligence. They play up that slow Southern drawl — which, by the way, is actually not common across the Southern dialects — to relay to the viewer a character that is uninformed, illiterate*, or uncultured. It is still acceptable, and oftentimes encouraged, in popular discourse to mock people for using this English variety.
*The assumption of illiteracy equaling uneducated is a disruptive fallacy in and of itself, which we will explore in a future post.
Kinzler and DeJesus determined that as children from the South grew up and started to develop social and cultural awareness from the information provided around them, they begin to associate the Northern English varieties with people being “in charge and smarter”. They write that this becomes a self-perpetuating stereotype, leading to our ingrained prejudices by the time we are nine years old — if not long before. As R. Douglas Fields explains, that although from a biological point of view there is no “correct” or “incorrect” way to speak, how we do so still influences our everyday choices. How people speak often dictates who we select as friends, who we look up to and respect, where we choose to live, and even our own self-perception.
Linguistic profiling is not just used against White people from the South: it is weaponized to other communities in the US and to other communities around the world. Black Americans are often labelled as unprofessional and uneducated for using African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Which, contrary to what is propagated about it, is completely untrue about the people who speak it — these stereotypes regarding dialect only continue to promote racism. AAVE has its own rules and syntax structures, just like many dialects that are mocked. (Let us also note that there are many Black Americans who speak varieties of Southern English). For example, French varieties such as Québécois and Louisiana French are often stereotyped as hick, uncultured.
And so, from a linguistic perspective, how are these “uneducated” stereotypes sustained? Because although Alabama consistently tops the list for worst education system in the US (shoutout to our maverick Mississippi for passing the baton back and forth with us on “the worst of” government lists), this has nothing to do with how we use our language. Most of our language learning does not come from school. By the time you start school, you have a decent grasp of your language. In the US, we don’t even take English grammar courses until our teens, typically. Across the US we all learn English primarily through our homes, through our communities. And Southern Appalachian English varieties? They have their own grammar rules and sounds and vocabulary. In Alabama we say, “Have you ate yet?”, as opposed to the standardized, “Have you eaten yet?”. This is not an accident, this is a grammatical feature of our English that we consistently use. And this is not because someone is uneducated, it’s because — well, actually the opposite — because they know their variety of English very well and they know how and when to use it.
……..
Over the past year, as I’ve developed a larger personal audience through work writings and events, I’ve become more and more aware about how I speak. One thing I’ve learned during this time is that there was an aspect from my Northeast Alabama English that wasn’t lost: my grammar. Yes, some of it disappeared; I no longer use the past tense for the verb “saw” in instances where I should use the past participle (in my hometown we would say, “I’ve saw that man before”, whereas in Standardized American English we would say, “I’ve seen that man before”). But some aspects of my grammar have remained Alabama, through and through, without me even realizing it — until people began to point it out to me. I use double modals and double markings, even in my academic writings. Oftentimes when speaking I drop the copula (also common in AAVE and Creole languages). And I love to use objective forms of personal pronouns in all settings.
For me, this use of English is standard, this makes sense. Since I’ve lived away from my hometown and have gotten older I’ve become more and more nostalgic for my heritage and my background. I regularly catch myself changing sentences in my head, rewording and restructuring them from how I said them outloud to how I would’ve said them if I was once again my five year old self. I feel a deep sense of loss that I no longer use words like britches and eating place and afeared and plumb without actively thinking about it beforehand. I wish I still peppered my conversation with Southern phrases like “More than Carter’s got little pills” and “what in Sam hill?” — and then when people asked, I could explain what it meant and provide context, that I could share a bit of my culture and childhood with them.
Sitting here now remembering these phrases reminds me of how creative and gosh darn funny Southerner’s are with their speech. I promise you, if you ever hear someone tell you that you are, “Hangin in there like a hair in a biscuit” (dont’ forget to drop the -g at the end of hanging, but y’all already got the hang of that!) or that he was, “Madder than a cat getting baptized”, you can’t tell me you won’t smile. That you won’t chuckle and look back on it and think wow, what a descriptive way to narrate that.
This is an aspect of language my colleagues and I often discuss, the belief that there is one singular version of a language that must be spoken. We all pronounce words differently, use different vocabulary — even those of us who grew up with the same first language, in the same town. And we do just fine. We understand each other, we create new slang and inside jokes.So why then are people so steadfast on implementing one version of their language, one that we all speak and write exactly the same, rattling off like programmed robots? Why in English is there one version of our language — that being the standardized, written form — that is considered the holy grail of our language?
I personally love our world as a kaleidoscope of voices, and I hope that I will forever have the opportunity to listen to and learn from all of our variations.