The Roots of Appalachian English: Scotch-Irish or Southern British?.
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The Roots of Appalachian English: Scotch-Irish or Southern British?.
Despite many folklore and cultural history projects seeking to identify the formative immigrant groups of Appalachia and their contributions, there has yet to be a systematic effort to connect Appalachian English to regional varieties of British English. This paper examines 40 grammatical features characteristic of Appalachian speech and identifies which are most likely Scotch-Irish and which are English. More resistant to change than vocabulary or pronunciation, grammar can be determined from old documents, and can be quantified. Table 1 lists the 40 features by parts of speech, and indicates whether the historical currency of each feature both ir Britain and in the U.S. was general or restricted. Table 2 groups the features according to five types of grammatical structures: inflectional forms; word order patterns; grammatical categories’ morphological forms differing from other dialects; and function words. Table 3 removes items whose locale of British origin is questionable and quantifies the five grammatical structural tlIts by general or Appalachian usage and by general British, south British, or Scotch-Irish origin. Of 25 features with only Appalachian usage, 16 are of Scotch-Irish origin. The results suggest a strong link in the grammatical systems of Scotch-Irish English and Appalachian English, a link extending across a range of grammatical feature types. This report contains 31 references. (SV) ******************************************************t**************** Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** THE ROOTS OF APPALACHIAN ENGLISH: SCOTCH-IRISH OR SOUTHERN BRITISH? by Michael Montgomery University of South Carolina BEST COPY AVAILABLE “PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY Clec4 M°K-fe Da-1414 TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC).” U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Otke ot Educahonai Research ano Improvement EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) ‘<is document has been regyoduced as received horn the oerson ot organization oricunatino it C &Amor changes have been madr to improve reproduction Quahty Points ot y’ew or opinions stated in this dOCU merit do not necessarily represent official OE RI pos.hol or pacy The Roots of Appalachian English: ScotchIrish or Southern British? Michael Montgomery, University of South Carolina In the popular television series The Storx of English and the resulting bestselling book (McCrum et al. 1986), the idea of tracing varieties of Americao English back to Britain has recently gained renewed attention. One episode of the series, A Muse of Fire, featured a New Englander dropping in on an East Anglian pub, purportedly in search of his Puritan ancestors’ speech patterns. A later show, The Guid Scots Tongue, examined the English of Scotland, exemplified by a Scotsman reading from William Lorimer’s 1983 translation of the New Testament into Scottish English. In the course of an hour this program made the case for how the language of Lowland Scotland and Northern Ireland evolved into the English used today by North Carolina’s denizen mountaineers, those latterday descendants of hardy “ScotchIrish” frontiersmen, and even into the Citizens Band Radio slang of long distance truck drivers. 1 American linguistic scholars have long been interested in exploring the roots of American English in the British Isles, notably in the early days of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada project in the nineteen thirties and forties (Kurath 1929, 1949). But for a number of reasons their progress has been slow, and in recent decades they have said little about tracing such connections, as it has become clear how much work is required to pin them down.2 Linking Appalachian culture and speech with the British Isles has been a part of the larger question of transAtlantic connections from the beginning, with varying commentators various labeling the region’s language as “ScotchIrish,” “British,”
