Sunday, January 23, 2022

Mountain speech may still be heard in rural West Virginia

 Pioneer Farm at Twin Falls Resort State Park

Though its speakers are aging and declining in number, there are still places in West Virginia where folks speak in what's known as the Southern Mountain Dialect, more often called Appalachian Speech.

Professor Wylene Dial was one of several authorities on the matter and studied it after she arrived in West Virginia in 1945 to attend Marshall University. She became enamored and was lucky to have been able to listen to the dialect as it was spoken in the '40s, '50s, and '60s—before radio and television helped erode much of its pure form.

More @ WV Explorer

4 comments:

  1. My darling bride has kin in them hollers. Not in W VA but in western NC. Her pa was a traveling preacher so she was born in Charleston and lived most her life on the Piedmont. Every now and then they'd go back to visit.

    Its fun when her speech effortlessly flows back into the mountain talk. Heck, we - her and me - have come up with our own language. Them folks up there are good people through and through.

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  2. One side of my family comes from Tennessee and settled in North Florida four or five generations back. My Grandparents on that side used many of the old words, phrases and grammatical structures. I wish I hadn't taken all that for granted. I enjoy using what little I remember of their dialect and vocabulary in conversation with people I've just met.

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