DOCUMENT RESUME ED 323 066 RC 017 723 AUTHOR Montgomery, Michael TITLE The Roots of Appalachian English: Scotch-Irish or Southern British? SPONS AGENCY National Endowment for the Humanities (NFAH), Washington, D.C.; South Carolina Univ., Columbia.; Eouthern Regional Education Board, Atlanta, Ga. PUB DATE Mar 90 NOTE 24p.; Paper presented at the Appalachian Studies Conference (March 23-25, 1990). PUB TYPE Speeches/Conference Papers (150) -- Reports - Research/Technical (143) EDRS PRICE MF01/PC01 PlIls Postage. DESCRIPTORS Contrastive Linguistics; Diachronic Linguistics; Dialect Studies; *English; *Grammar; *Regional Dialects IDENTIFIERS *Appalachia ABSTRACT 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 "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS U S DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Otke ot Educahonai Research ano Improvement MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) M°K-fe Clec4 '<is document has been regyoduced as received horn the oerson ot organization Da-141- oricunatino it C &Amor changes have been madr to improve reproduction Quahty TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES 4 Points ot y'ew or opinions stated in this dOCU merit do not necessarily represent official INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC)." pacy OE RI pos.hol or BEST COPY AVAILABLE 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 1 distance truck drivers. 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, But for a number of reasons their progress has been slow, and 1949). 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," "(Elizabethan) English," or the 1 3 However, while scholars in other fields have made significant like. progress in describing the trans-Atlantic diffusion of cultural r patterns into Appalachia, the same has hardly been the case for language patterns. For decades, hosts of folklore researchers and collectors have prowled the hills of Southern Appalachia to study the spread of Scottish, Irish, and English traits and to capture the echoes of earfy American immigrants in song, in story, and in voice. One early example was Englishman Cecil Sharp, who sought Child ballads in Eastern Kentucky in 1916 and 1917 with his assistant Maud Karpeles (Sharp Many others could easily be cited. 1932). Most recently, Civil War historian Grady McWhinney in Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways of the Old South (1988) has articulated the provocative claim that such personality traits as hospitableness, love of leisure, propensity for violent behavior, and aversion to work were carried over from Ireland, Scotland, and the "Celtic Fringe" areas of the British Isles to the American South as a whole and were reinforced enough to steer the "Celtic" South onto a collision course with the "English" North, most of whose early immigrants came from the South and East of Britain, in that fateful year of 1861. Closer to home, many authorities within Appalachia, such as John C. Campbell (1921), Josiah Combs (1943), and Cratis Williams (1961), the latter two native to the region, have devoted a good deal of energy to untying the early settlement patterns in an effort to determine the collective genealogy of the region's inhabitants and to assess the relative proportions of Scotch-Irish, English, and German population groups in the region. To do this, Campbell and Combs examined patterns of surnames, Campbell of 1200 old families from Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina mountain areas and Combs of his Eastern Kentucky schoolchildren from local families. Campbell (p. 65) found equal portions of English and ScotchIrish, while Combs' smaller sample included predominantly English names.3 One explicit purpose of such research was, in addition to the straightforward calculation of national stocks in Appalachia, was to temper the types of extravagant statements about the role of the ScotchIrish in settling and subduing the frontier that were being made around the turn of the twentieth century by such writers as Theodore Roosevelt in The Winning of the But an implicit goal, for Campbell and Williams, was to provide, West. by exploring the history of Appalachia, a specific cultural identity for the region's people--an identity connected directly to Old World forebears--in the face of a prevailing national view that saw the region in negative terms as having little culture and an unflattering history. Of course, this goal of cultural affirmation also was held by many balladcollectors and other researchers who have written about the region. However, despite much work by folklorists and cultural historians to identify the formative immigrant groups of Appalachia and their contributions, and despite the assumption that the same should be possible for language, there has yet to be a systematic effort to make the language connection to regional varieties of British English, and only cursory statements have been made. While Cratis Williams often claimed that the distinccive features of Appalachian speech were mostly ScotchIrish, other writers have claimed that they come primarily from the English of Southern Britain (thus producing the familiar statement that Appalachian English is "Elizabethan"). Neither Williams nor 3 5 anyone else, including linguistic scholars, has attempted the careful sorting out of the major strands woven together into Appalachian English and to calculate more precisely the significance of each one. The only partial exceptions to this are two short studies by Wylene Dial (1969) in West Virginia and Alan Crozier (1984) in Western Pennsylvania. The present paper examines the range of grammatical features noted as characteristic of Appalachian speech, to identity which are most likely ScotchIrish and which are English (very little, if any, German influence on Appalachian grammar turns out to be detectable), and to compare the relative significance of these two linguistic ancestries. Before turning to this, it is necessary to say a few things about the scope and significance of such a project. Why, despite frequent scattered comments in the literature, has a concerted assessment of the relative linguistic contributions of the aforementioned groups not been undertaken, especially given the keen interest over the past century in pinning down the ancestry of Appalachian people? These are basically two reasons for this. 1) Firat is a problem of knowledge and sources. Americans know quite little about the earlier stages of English spoken in Scotland and Northern Ireland (the general familiarity with the writ4ngs of Shakespeare and his contemporaries has no doubt led many writers to believe that Appalachian English is more "Elizabethan" than it actually Few American scholars, at least those who have written on the is). language of Appelachia, are acquainted with the fact that there is not one, but two multivoluma historical dictionaries of Scottish English, tne Scottish National Dicr.ionary (Grant and Murison 1931-84) and the Dictionary of the Older Scottish Tongue (Craigie and Aitken 1933 ). 4 6 The question at hand cannot be addressed by using the Oxford English Dictionary, the bestknown and most comprehensive historical dictionary of the language, because its coverage of nonliterary and regional varieties of English is quite limited. All historical dictionaries, moreover, have builtin handicaps; being only as good as their written citation files, they are heavily biased toward literary language and offer little direct evidence on the speech patterns of the common people. Also, they suffer from the problem of negative evidence; that is, while we may discover from the entry of a word in a dictionary when and where that word was used, we cannot necessarily conclude from the absence of a word that it did not exist, or from the absence of a citation that a word was not used at a certain time and place. Thus it is necessary to go beyond dictionaries and to consult linguistic studies and original sources themselves. An extensive literature on Scottish English does exist, though it is largely tucked away in the nooks of major British libraries is as there is yet no good bibliography to dig it out. The problem for the English language of Northern Ireland is that most of the few studies that have been done unpublished.4 are 2) The second reason why such an assessment has not been achieved is that previous claims that Appalachian English was basically "Scotch Irish" or basically "Eliznbethan" lacked a methodology for making a determination. The present paper draws on an extended tese rch effort to identify the roots of Appalachian English, an effort that uses, as well as a wide range of reference works on American and British English,5 primary sources (local dictionaries and archival material from the seventeenth 5 7 and eighteenth centuries and consultations with local authorities in both Northern Ireland and Scotland). It bases the comparison of Appalachian English and ScotchIrish English on a variety of sources not used heretofore by American linguists. As far as the Appalachian material is concerned, the published resources have recently been marshaled in an annotated bibliography (McMillan and Montgomery 1989) and unparalleled unpublished resources (i.e. Joseph Hall's recordings of Smoky Mountain speech from thc 1930s) are now being used to fill in the gaps between presentday Appalachian English and the language of the immigrant period (Montgomery and Hall forthcoming). In short, for the first time the research tools and materials are available to address the question of the ancestry of distinctive Appalachian speech ratterns in a valid way. This project utilizes a framework for comparison, based on principles of historical linguistics, that establishes linguistic and sociolinguistic standards by which individual features may be judged as deriving from one area of the British Isles or another (Montgomery In other words, it offers a principled basis for saying whether 1989). aprefixing (in 'a bear come arunnin' at me") is ScotchIrish, Southern British, German, or none of the'se. From the comparisIn undertaken in this paper, we can state much more precisely how "Elizabethan" and how "ScotchIrish" Appalachian English is than has been the case before now. This paper focuses on grammatical features rather than on vocabulary or pronunciation. Grammar has been shown by linguists to be "deeper" in a language and more resistant to change, at least rapid change, than the vocabulary and pronunciation of a language. Because grammatical features and forms usually exist in relation to one another 6 8 and participate in certain systems like the expression of verb tense or noun plurality, this makes them more likely to preserve traceable elements. By comparison, vocabulary is much more easily and quickly borrowed across languages and dialects. Pronunciation is also less stable, linguists have shown; even in isolated communities it continually evolves according to the social dynamics of the speakers. Grammatical features have two further advantages; they can be clearly determined from old written documents, and they are quantifiable. Beyond the general motivation for urdertaking this study--to pin down the ancestry of Appalachian ,:ulture and language--lies an important linguistic question of whether an assessment can be made. The mosL common vie4 in American dialect studies is that features distinctive to one B,:itif:h dialect or anothe: were probably brought to ths American colonies, out they were more or less leveled ,lut and lost in the colonial period. Thus a few itams, IL is thought, may have linCered on as "colonial lags" hut most distinctive grammatical patterns in American English represent general patterns of rural and oldfashioned speeel that have been inherited from the folk speech of Britain and were to be found throughout much of the U.S. in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at least- for the white population. In other words, historians of American English atr i;enerally skeptical about how many older elements cf specific British di.alects have been preserved in the U.S. and especially about how many of these elements have been confined to a specific region of North America such as Appalachia. Thus, to linguists, undertaking the comparison discussed here and as a result answering the questions about the roots of Appalachian 7 English will do at least three things: a) tell us about processes of dialect migration, contact, and change; b) show us how individual features of American English have evolved from their Old World progenitors; and c) fill in the gaps in the evolution of American English, particularly in the colonial period. Methodology We turn now to the assembled data, which are presented in four tables that attempt to give the broadest view of characteristic Appalachian grammatical features. Table 1 lists forty features, by part of speech, that are the primary items examined in this project so far (nxamples of each feature can be found in table 4 in the appendix). Table 1 indicates the determination to date. for each feature, as to whether its historical currency in Britain was general (column 1) or limited to a region of the British Isles (column 2) and also as to whether its distribution in the United States is or has been general (column 3) or limited to a specific region (column 4). What is a "characteristic Appalachian grammatical feature"? This is a rough construct, and it will be taken here to represent a grammatical structure or category whose occurrence is more or less limited to the Appalachia or to the Midland territory (as defined by Kurath 1949:27) or which occurs to a significantly higher degree in It is not argued here that every feature in our tables these ret4ions. is unique to the region; in fact, a number of features discussed in studies of Appalachian English are characteristic of older-fashioned American English in general (such as blowed and growed as past-tense It is also not argued that all forty features in Table 1 are forms). used by all Appalachian speakers or found throughout Appalachia. Many 8 Jo