40 Fun Facts About Appalachian English

In Appalachian English, a 'toboggan', a sled to most Americans, is usually which piece of winter clothing?

A knit hat is the usual meaning of 'toboggan' across Appalachia, where the word is only rarely used for a sled. Canadians call the same cap a tuque.

An Appalachian shopper who asks for a 'poke', the word in the old warning about buying a pig, wants what?

A paper bag is a 'poke' in the mountains, and the proverb's pig went to market tied up in a cloth one. The same French root gave English 'pocket' and 'pouch'.

People from southern Appalachia pronounce the region's name with a third syllable that sounds like which word?

Latch is the sound locals use, so the name comes out roughly as 'apple-atcha'. People who live outside the dialect area, or at its outer edges, tend to say that syllable like 'lay' instead.

Which animal do Appalachian speakers call a 'whistle pig', after the shrill alarm call it gives when frightened?

Groundhog is the animal behind the nickname: when alarmed it whistles a high-pitched warning to the rest of its colony. Its other folk names include woodchuck and land beaver.

In Appalachian speech, what is a 'haint', the being that pale 'haint blue' porch ceilings were painted to keep away?

A ghost or restless spirit is a haint, a word that began as a variant of 'haunt'. The blue ceiling custom started among the Gullah people of Georgia and South Carolina.

Which Pennsylvania city's residents are nicknamed 'Yinzers' after 'yinz', their form of the Appalachian 'you'uns'?

Pittsburgh speakers wore 'you ones' down to 'you'uns' and finally 'yinz'. The word is now a badge of local pride, lending its name to a literary magazine and a software company.

A popular but inaccurate theory calls Appalachian English a preserved relic of the speech of which monarch's reign?

Elizabeth I gets the credit in the myth, which paints mountain speech as English frozen in the 1500s. Linguists say the colonial English of the 1700s is a far closer match.

Which country singer grew up in the Kentucky coal community of Butcher Hollow, known to locals as 'Butcher Holler'?

Loretta Lynn was born there in 1932. A replica of the cabin she grew up in later became a main attraction at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

An Appalachian speaker who says 'I might could help', a pairing also heard in Scots, means what?

I may be able to is the sense: 'might could' stacks two helping verbs, which linguists call a double modal. It is the most common of dozens of such pairings recorded in the South.

Appalachian speakers often say 'ink pen' because a vowel merger makes 'pen' sound identical to which other word?

Pin and 'pen' are pronounced alike across Appalachia and the South, so speakers add a describing word to tell them apart. The sewing item becomes a 'straight' or 'safety' one.

Appalachian 'holler' is a local pronunciation of 'hollow', a word for which kind of mountain landform?

A small valley, sheltered between hills, is a holler: the final sound of 'hollow' turns into 'er'. The same change makes 'yellow' come out as 'yeller'.

The Scotch-Irish settlers who shaped Appalachian English had emigrated from which province in the north of Ireland?

Ulster sent waves of emigrants to the American colonies in the 1700s. Their own ancestors had mostly crossed to Ireland from Lowland Scotland and northern England a century earlier.

Which label for Appalachian people, first printed in the 1890s, was once the record trade's name for country music?

Hillbilly music was once the accepted label for country, spread by a record executive who heard Southerners use the word. Appalachians themselves never used the term for their own music.

Which word, better known as slang for illegal drugs, was an old Appalachian name for a fizzy soft drink?

Dope meant a soda in parts of Appalachia. Speakers in the southern half of the region were more likely to call every soft drink a 'coke', while those farther north said 'pop'.

The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville since 1925, takes its last word from a mountain pronunciation of what?

Opera becomes 'opry' because mountain speakers often turn a final 'a' into an 'ee' sound. The show took the name in 1927, when it went on air straight after a program of grand opera.

A porch that an Appalachian carpenter calls 'sigogglin', a word for something not built right, is what?

Crooked, skewed or out of balance is the meaning of 'sigogglin'. Other American dialects have a sister word, 'antigodlin', for anything that sits askew.

Which is the only US state that lies entirely within Appalachia, as mapped by the Appalachian Regional Commission?

West Virginia has all 55 of its counties inside the commission's boundary. The region as mapped runs from southern New York down to Mississippi and takes in parts of twelve other states.

An Appalachian speaker who calls the morning 'airish', a word traced to Scotch-Irish settlers, finds the weather what?

Chilly and breezy weather is 'airish'. One linguist listed it among 22 mountain words handed down from Scotch-Irish, Scottish and Northumbrian speech.

In the strongest Appalachian accents, where the long 'i' loses its glide, 'tire' sounds identical to which word?

Tar is how 'tire' comes out, just as 'fire' turns into 'far' and 'wire' into 'war'. Linguists count this flattening of the long 'i' as the first stage of the Southern vowel shift.

A 'jarfly', in Appalachian English, is which insect, known for the loud droning song males make on summer days?

Cicada is the standard name for the mountain jarfly. The males make their racket by rapidly buckling a pair of drum-like membranes on the abdomen called tymbals.

Which traditional Appalachian form of 'hunting' carries a prefix worn down from the old preposition 'on'?

A-huntin' shows the prefix, which grew out of the old phrase 'on hunting' and peaked between 1500 and 1700. It attaches only to action words stressed on their opening syllable.

Which everyday word do some Appalachian speakers say with an added 'r' sound, a holdover from colonial speech?

Wash comes out as 'warsh' or 'worsh' for these speakers. The intruding sound is one of several colonial-era habits the mountains kept after standard American speech dropped them.

When an Appalachian speaker wakes to a 'skift' outside, a word borrowed from Scots, what is on the ground?

A dusting of snow is a skift, from a Scots word for a light shower. It is a cousin of 'skiff', another dialect word for a brief, light fall of rain or snow.

What do Appalachians call a mountain summit covered in grass or shrubs where forest would normally be expected?

A bald is the mountain word for such a summit, like Round Bald on Roan Mountain. Why some peaks stay open while their neighbors grow thick forest is still a mystery, with several rival theories.

Which Appalachian word for 'frightened' was ordinary speech in England until the early 1800s, when 'afraid' replaced it?

Afeared was common across northern England and the Midlands for three centuries before it faded. Mountain speakers never made the switch, so the old form now sounds Appalachian.

Which lamp fuel, first trademarked in the 1850s, did Appalachian households traditionally call 'coal oil'?

Kerosene was trademarked in 1854 by the Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner. His original product was also known as coal oil, and the name clung to the fuel long after refiners made it from petroleum.

Appalachian and other Southern speakers say which adjective with a 'z' sound, though its root noun keeps an 's'?

Greasy comes out as 'greazy' in the mountains and across the South, and in some British speech too. The 'z' also appears when 'grease' is used as an action word.

Which magazine, begun in 1966 by Georgia high school students, recorded the speech and skills of Appalachian elders?

Foxfire grew out of a classroom project in Rabun County, where students interviewed their mountain neighbors. The articles were collected into a book in 1972 that became a national bestseller.

The Appalachian habit of saying 'quarter till five' preserves a word that British dialects took from which language?

Old Norse gave British speech the word 'till' during the Viking settlements of roughly 800 to 1050. Mountain grammar also keeps the Norse 'at' in place of 'that'.

Linguists also name Appalachian English after which range on the Tennessee–North Carolina border?

Smoky Mountains speech gave the dialect its other scholarly name, Smoky Mountain English. Interviews with long-time residents were recorded there as early as 1939.

Linguists group Appalachian speech into one 'Southern Mountain' dialect with the English of which region farther west?

The Ozarks, in northern Arkansas and southern Missouri, inherited the dialect as it spread west. Studies find the speech there closer to that of East Tennessee than to nearby eastern Arkansas.

In Appalachian speech, a dog described as 'ill' is not sick; the word instead means the animal is what?

Bad-tempered is the mountain sense of 'ill'. The word meant 'evil' or 'wicked' when it entered English in the 1200s, and its sense of 'sick' arrived only two centuries later.

In the southern Appalachians, a 'boomer' is the local name for a small red species of which animal?

Squirrel is right: the boomer is the American red squirrel, known elsewhere as the pine squirrel or chickaree. It feeds mainly on the seeds of conifer cones.

In Appalachian English, 'liketa', a form used just before a past-tense verb, means roughly what?

Nearly is the closest standard word: something that 'liketa' happened came very close but did not. Linguists note that it behaves differently from 'almost' and cannot always replace it.

In Appalachian English, a cook who has 'gaumed up' the kitchen, using a word that is also a noun, has done what?

Made a mess is the meaning: 'gaum' can be the mess itself or the act of creating one. In wider dialect use, on both sides of the Atlantic, the same word means to smear.

Appalachian 'double nouns' pair two words for one thing, as in 'hound dog' and which name for an amphibian?

Toad frog joins 'rifle gun' and 'widow woman' among the mountain pairings in which the first noun describes a seemingly redundant second. Even a luxury sedan can become a 'Cadillac car'.

A 'tow sack', in Appalachian English, is a bag made of which coarse fabric, traditionally woven from jute?

Burlap is the fabric of a tow sack. 'Tow' is an old word for the short, coarse fibers left over when flax or hemp is combed.

In the old Appalachian exclamation 'I swan', also heard as 'I swanny', 'swan' carries the meaning of which verb?

Swear is the meaning: to 'swan' or 'swanny' is to declare firmly that something is true. Dictionaries record it as American dialect, used almost only in the first person.

Which adverb, kept alive in Appalachian speech, points to something distant from both the speaker and the listener?

Yonder marks a spot away from both people in a conversation, and some mountain speakers say 'yander'. The word was carried over from the rural north and Midlands of England.

An Appalachian speaker who calls a man 'plumb crazy', using a word for a builder's lead weight, means crazy how?

Completely is the sense of 'plumb' here. The word comes from the Latin for lead, by way of the weighted line that builders hang to find a true vertical.