Talking Appalachian: Voice, Identity, and Community

The Appalachian Range

54 The Appalachian Range The Limits of LanguageVariation inWestVirginia Kirk Hazen, Jaime Flesher, and Erin Simmons Consider the following scene from the TV show The Golden Girls: Dorothy: Ma, what are you doing? Sophia: Getting ready. There’s a hurricane a-coming! Dorothy: A-coming? Sophia: Yes. People only use the a- if a really big storm is a-coming or a-brewing. Dorothy: Look, Ma, I don’t mean to be a-criticizing you. Sophia: Don’t you patronize me! Dorothy: I’m not patronizing you. I’m a-mocking you!1 In this exchange, a single sound triggers a lot of social meaning. A dialect feature like the a- prefix carries such strong social meaning because it is associated with stigmatized regions like Appalachia. Perhaps because of this stigma, use of the a- prefix is relatively rare in modern Appalachian speech. Other, more frequent dialect features go largely unnoticed because they are not associated with a stigmatized social group. How noticeable any bit of language is for an audience is directly related to its social associations, not to its frequency or its linguistic qualities. This range between stigmatized and more standard dialect features is explored here for The Appalachian Range 55 the West Virginia region of Appalachia in order to highlight how modern varieties of English in Appalachia work linguistically and socially. Often, outsiders consider English in Appalachia to be a one-dimensional , highly vernacular dialect. However, our sociolinguistic research inWestVirginiasuggeststhatthisisanunjustifiedstereotype.Itisimportant to explain how such stereotypes are false so as to paint a more accurate picture of life, culture, and language in West Virginia. Based on work by the West Virginia Dialect Project (WVDP),2 we review ten dialect features to showcase the wide variety of language features employed by English speakers in West Virginia—from features that are highly stigmatized to those that do not appear on the social radar. Some speakers commonly use the vernacular forms; others rarely use them at all. It is this range of variation that we explore here. Methods andVariables Our results come from studies based on the West Virginia Corpus of English in Appalachia (WVCEA). The WVCEA comprises interviews with sixty-seven speakers who are fairly evenly divided by age, region, and sex (see the accompanying table). They come from towns and rural areas throughout West Virginia, including the counties of Logan, Mingo, Mercer, Raleigh, Fayette, Greenbrier, Kanawha, Boone, Lincoln, Gilmer, Pleasant, Harrison, Barbour, Jefferson, Preston, Monongalia, Marion, Brooke, and Hancock. Figure 1 maps the speakers’ home areas. These speakers were interviewed by Kirk Hazen and research associates of the WVDP beginning in 1998.3 Sociolinguistic interviews such as these are designed to facilitate free-flowing, unself-conscious conversation; they are specifically designed not to be question-and-answer sessions so that we can obtain conversations that are as relaxed as possible. We also relied on a separate group of sixteen speakers born between 1871 and 1918, all but two of whom were male. These interviews were recorded in the late 1960s and early 1970s as part of an oral history project on mining and are available through the West Virginia and Regional History Collection.4 These speakers were also divided evenly by region. Although the actual boundary line is disputable, most dialect atlases and our own survey of native West Virginians indicate that an east-west line 56 Kirk Hazen, Jaime Flesher, and Erin Simmons running through Braxton County is a reliable division for northern and southern regions of West Virginia. In the sociolinguistic scholarship of dialects, language is often studied through the analysis of variables. The different forms speakers can produce are called variants of the variable. A classic example, so-called g-dropping, provides a good illustration, despite the fact that no g’s are actually dropped. The variation between walkin’ and walking is the difference between two nasal sounds, [n] and [ŋ]: the first is heard at the end of pin, and the second at the end of ping. Both forms are variants of the Table 1. Social Breakdown of the Sixty-Seven Speakers Constituting the West Virginia Corpus of English in Appalachia Characteristic Number of People Year of birth Group 2: 1919–1947 23 Group 3: 1950–1979 23 Group 4: 1980–1989 21 Sex Female 32 Male 35 Region Northern West Virginia 33 Southern West Virginia 34 College experience Some college 45 No college 22 Ethnicity African American 6 European American 61 Social...