Appalachian English
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40 free Appalachian English trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Appalachian English is one of the most distinctive varieties of American speech, and one of the most misunderstood. Outsiders have long treated the mountain accent as a punchline, yet linguists who study it find a consistent grammar, a vocabulary with deep roots across the Atlantic, and a blend of very old habits with newer ones. Many of its words sound mysterious to visitors and perfectly ordinary to anyone raised in the hills. This quiz covers the dialect from several angles. You will be asked what well-known mountain words and expressions mean, how the accent changes the sound of everyday words, and how the grammar stacks, trims and rearranges standard English. Other questions look at where the dialect came from, the myths that have grown up around it, the region where it is spoken, and the people and projects that recorded it. It is written for people who grew up with the dialect and want to see how much they still know, for anyone with family ties to the region, and for language lovers curious about American accents. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so you learn the story behind each word as you play.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Appalachian English, a 'toboggan', a sled to most Americans, is usually which piece of winter clothing?
A knit hat
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.
Q 02An Appalachian shopper who asks for a 'poke', the word in the old warning about buying a pig, wants what?
A paper bag
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'.
Q 03People from southern Appalachia pronounce the region's name with a third syllable that sounds like which word?
Latch
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.
Q 04Which animal do Appalachian speakers call a 'whistle pig', after the shrill alarm call it gives when frightened?
Groundhog
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.
Q 05In Appalachian speech, what is a 'haint', the being that pale 'haint blue' porch ceilings were painted to keep away?
A ghost
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.
Q 06Which Pennsylvania city's residents are nicknamed 'Yinzers' after 'yinz', their form of the Appalachian 'you'uns'?
Pittsburgh
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.
Q 07A popular but inaccurate theory calls Appalachian English a preserved relic of the speech of which monarch's reign?
Elizabeth I
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.
Q 08Which country singer grew up in the Kentucky coal community of Butcher Hollow, known to locals as 'Butcher Holler'?
Loretta Lynn
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.
Q 09An Appalachian speaker who says 'I might could help', a pairing also heard in Scots, means what?
I may be able to
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.
Q 10Appalachian speakers often say 'ink pen' because a vowel merger makes 'pen' sound identical to which other word?
Pin
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.
Q 11Appalachian 'holler' is a local pronunciation of 'hollow', a word for which kind of mountain landform?
A small valley
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'.
Q 12The Scotch-Irish settlers who shaped Appalachian English had emigrated from which province in the north of Ireland?
Ulster
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.
Q 13Which label for Appalachian people, first printed in the 1890s, was once the record trade's name for country music?
Hillbilly
Q 21Which traditional Appalachian form of 'hunting' carries a prefix worn down from the old preposition 'on'?
A-huntin'
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.
Q 22Which everyday word do some Appalachian speakers say with an added 'r' sound, a holdover from colonial speech?
Wash
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.
Q 23When an Appalachian speaker wakes to a 'skift' outside, a word borrowed from Scots, what is on the ground?
A dusting of snow
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.
Q 14Which word, better known as slang for illegal drugs, was an old Appalachian name for a fizzy soft drink?
Dope
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'.
Q 15The Grand Ole Opry, broadcast from Nashville since 1925, takes its last word from a mountain pronunciation of what?
Opera
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.
Q 16A porch that an Appalachian carpenter calls 'sigogglin', a word for something not built right, is what?
Crooked
Crooked, skewed or out of balance is the meaning of 'sigogglin'. Other American dialects have a sister word, 'antigodlin', for anything that sits askew.
Q 17Which is the only US state that lies entirely within Appalachia, as mapped by the Appalachian Regional Commission?
West Virginia
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.
Q 18An Appalachian speaker who calls the morning 'airish', a word traced to Scotch-Irish settlers, finds the weather what?
Chilly
Chilly and breezy weather is 'airish'. One linguist listed it among 22 mountain words handed down from Scotch-Irish, Scottish and Northumbrian speech.
Q 19In the strongest Appalachian accents, where the long 'i' loses its glide, 'tire' sounds identical to which word?
Tar
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.
Q 20A 'jarfly', in Appalachian English, is which insect, known for the loud droning song males make on summer days?
Cicada
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.
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.
Q 24What do Appalachians call a mountain summit covered in grass or shrubs where forest would normally be expected?
A bald
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.
Q 25Which Appalachian word for 'frightened' was ordinary speech in England until the early 1800s, when 'afraid' replaced it?
Afeared
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.
Q 26Which lamp fuel, first trademarked in the 1850s, did Appalachian households traditionally call 'coal oil'?
Kerosene
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.
Q 27Appalachian and other Southern speakers say which adjective with a 'z' sound, though its root noun keeps an 's'?
Greasy
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.
Q 28Which magazine, begun in 1966 by Georgia high school students, recorded the speech and skills of Appalachian elders?
Foxfire
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.
Q 29The Appalachian habit of saying 'quarter till five' preserves a word that British dialects took from which language?
Old Norse
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'.
Q 30Linguists also name Appalachian English after which range on the Tennessee–North Carolina border?
Smoky Mountains
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.