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The Treatment of Dialect in Appalachian Literature Chapter Author(S): Michael Ellis University Press of Kentucky Chapter Title: The Treatment of Dialect in Appalachian Literature Chapter Author(s): Michael Ellis Book Title: Talking Appalachian Book Subtitle: Voice, Identity, and Community Book Editor(s): Amy D. Clark, Nancy M. Hayward Published by: University Press of Kentucky. (2013) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2jckk2.13 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms University Press of Kentucky is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Talking Appalachian This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:49:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Treatment of Dialect in Appalachian Literature Michael Ellis Stereotypes about Appalachian culture and Appalachian English have been around so long that it is hard to imagine a time when they did not exist, a time before there was even a distinctive variety of English in the region. Dialectologists, linguistic geographers, lexicographers, and so- ciolinguists have added considerably to our knowledge of Appalachian Englishes in the twentieth century and beyond, but how Appalachian varieties developed and what they were like in the nineteenth century are only beginning to be understood.1 However, long before the first linguistic studies were published, many Americans thought they were already familiar with the language of the southern highlands and had formed opinions about it—usually negative. The purpose of this essay is to describe literary depictions of Appalachian English since the mid- nineteenth century, explore what these “literary dialects” tell us about earlier Appalachian Englishes, and, finally, reach some understanding about how these literary dialects contributed to popular notions about Appalachian English. In the summer of 1845, George Washington Harris published the first in a series of humorous sketches in William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times. The sketch, titled “The Knob Dance—A Tennessee Frolic,” is one of the earliest examples of an Appalachian literary dialect.2 This story is about a dance party at Jo Spraggins’s house in southern Knox County, Tennessee. It is recounted by a character named Dick Harlan and is presented in a 163 This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:49:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hayward Talking Appal BOOK.indb 163 2/19/2013 3:34:19 PM 164 Michael Ellis manner intended to represent the way Dick talked: “The supper is made up by the fellers; every one fetches sumthin; sum a lick of meal, sum a middlin of bacon, sum a hen, sum a possum, sum a punkin, sum a grab of taters, or a pocket full of peas, or dried apples, an sum only fetches a good appetite and a skin chock full of perticular deviltry.”3 This literary dialect, which Harris also used later in his Sut Lovingood stories, was no doubt influenced by the techniques employed by his literary ante- cedents to represent a wide variety of rural or frontier speech. These mid-nineteenth-century literary dialects would, in turn, influence sev- eral generations of writers who sought to portray the spoken language of the southern highlands, an influence that would last into the early twentieth century. The number of books published over the past 150 years with Appa- lachian settings and characters is staggering. In his 1961 doctoral dis- sertation, Cratis Williams lists more than 260 individual writers who produced fiction with Appalachian settings—a list limited to the period from the end of the Civil War through the late 1950s.4 In 1964 Lorise C. Boger compiled an annotated bibliography at West Virginia University that includes 496 titles of literary works set in the southern mountains and published during the same period.5 These works of fiction cover a wide variety of literary periods and genres, from the frontier humor of the 1840s through 1860s, the local color movement of the 1870s through 1920s, and the agrarian sociological novels from the 1930s through at least the 1950s. The body of literature that can be called “Appalachian” is much too large and diverse to allow easy generalizations, but one thing is certain: the majority of these works of fiction include the portrayal of Appalachian speech in one form or another. Written language is, at best, an imperfect medium for conveying the often subtle complexities of a spoken dialect. This has not, however, deterred writers from attempting to imitate or suggest spoken language, although their methods have var- ied considerably. Several issues arise with regard to Appalachian literary dialects: What is the nature of these literary dialects? How authentic are they, and can they be used as a source of linguistic evidence? What has been the social impact of these literary representations? Finally, how have Appalachian writers since the 1930s chosen to portray the speech of their home communities? This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:49:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hayward Talking Appal BOOK.indb 164 2/19/2013 3:34:19 PM The Treatment of Dialect in Appalachian Literature 165 What Is a Literary Dialect? A literary dialect is an attempt by a writer to portray a regional, social, or ethnic language variety. These authors are writing for audiences of nonspecialists, are not linguists themselves, and are often not attempt- ing to produce a realistic or authentic spoken language. Therefore, we must take great care when evaluating the usefulness of literary dialects as linguistic evidence. Most often, the literary dialect is confined to those portions of the text consisting of dialogue between characters. Sometimes the literary dialect is used throughout the entire text, in the form of either a first-person narrative or a text supposedly “written” by a semiliterate character. This technique is sometimes referred to as dialect writing. Harris used this approach by creating a narrative frame in which his persona, “George,” introduces and provides the context for the long monologues presented by his character Sut Lovingood.6 In The Biglow Papers, James Russell Lowell used a written version of dialect writing in the form of letters to the editor penned by his fictional Mas- sachusetts farmer.7 The specific techniques used to convey the impression that characters are “talking” have varied considerably, depending on the time period, the genre, the writer’s degree of creativity or talent, and his or her personal knowledge of the dialect being portrayed.8 In the past, writers often used unconventional spelling to suggest variant pronunciations. These pho- netic spellings include larn for learn, jine for join, skear for scare, widder for widow, and hoss for horse. Nineteenth-century writers tended to use these phonetic spellings much more often than twentieth-century writ- ers. In the nineteenth century, many writers also used what is known as eye dialect, unconventional spellings that have no phonetic significance but are used to give readers the impression that characters are illiterate.9 Common examples of eye dialect include wuz for was, minnit for minute, licker for liquor, and wimmin for women. Our alphabet, however, has sig- nificant limitations in terms of how it can be used to portray the sound of a dialect. There are more sounds (phonemes) in English than can be accommodated by the twenty-six letters of the Roman alphabet, and rep- resenting the many vowel sounds in English is particularly problematic. For example, writers have always had difficulty representing the vowel This content downloaded from 76.77.170.243 on Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:49:02 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Hayward Talking Appal BOOK.indb 165 2/19/2013 3:34:19 PM 166 Michael Ellis sounds in the common southern American pronunciations of words such as tired, wife, and nice. Therefore, although spelling occasionally provides important clues about pronunciation, it is probably the least reliable and most problematic indicator. Moreover, when nonstandard spelling is overused, it can create the misguided impression of ignorance and so- cial divergence. This is probably why many writers since the 1930s have tended to use nonstandard spelling only sparingly. Although writers have difficulty reproducing speech sounds, they sometimes do a much better job of representing the characteristic grammar and vocabulary of a dialect. In the twentieth century, writ- ers tended to rely primarily on nonstandard grammatical features as a way of suggesting the spoken dialect of characters, including those from Appalachia. Among the most common grammatical features are nonstandard past tenses and past participles, as in “I seen him yester- day,” “They knowed all about it,” and “We have already eat our dinner.” Also common are nonstandard subject–verb/auxiliary agreement, as in “We was just talking about him”; nonstandard negative concord, as in “You don’t know nothing about it”; and the demonstrative them, as in “Them boys will be here in the morning.” Vocabulary is somewhat more challenging, and in the past, many writers avoided words and us- ages that might not be familiar to a general readership. Nevertheless, enough lexical variation exists in literary dialects to supply a signifi- cant number of citations for lexicographers. Unfortunately, no matter how many or what kinds of nonstandard features individual writers use, we are still confronted with the major problem of determining the authenticity of an individual literary dialect and what, if anything, the language spoken by fictional characters has to tell us about how living people actually speak.
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