Appalachian English

  In 1991 I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It took six months. During my adventure I wandered through the heart of the Appalachian mountains. The people I met left a major impact on me. One aspect of my experience, which always made me chuckle was the back woods country dialect of Appalachian English. Without having a background in English Literature i was unable to appreciate the the linguistic structure of what I was listening to.

When I began to research various sources for this project certain vocabulary words began to surface which were quite familiar to me. For example a bald is a mountain that is void of trees. I had heard the term in my hike such as various balds in Tennessee or Brasstown Bald which is the highest point in Georgia. The term Hollow was another such term. Again my mind raced back to the homestead of an old hill billy that I stayed with for over a week. He called his property Rusty's Hardtime Hollow. of course the Hollow was actually pronounced Holler'.

As a student in the modern world I was very much aware of how language evolves and changes. Examples exist around us everyday. it never really occurred to me until this assignment how a language could become isolated and cut off from the rest of the population. This is what happened to the native speakers of Appalachian English. Some sources suggest that  Appalachian English is a direct link to Elizabethan English, it was through their remote isolation that the pockets of this spoken language were able to flourish into the modern day.