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  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • THE LATEST
  • GENERAL INTEREST
  • SMOKY MOUNTAIN SUITE
  • LINGUISTIC SUITE
    • --Linguistic Articles
    • ---Links of Linguistic Interest
    • ---Annotated Bibliography of Southern Appalachian English
    • --The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech
    • ---Grammar and Syntax of Smoky Mountain English
    • ---Wolfram and Christian: Sociolinguistic Variables in Appalachian Dialects
    • ---Transcription Protocol
    • --Corpus of Early Smoky Mountain English (CESME)
    • ---Known Transcription Issues
    • --Archive of Traditional Appalachian Speech and Culture
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LINGUISTIC SUITE

Welcome to the Linguistic Suite.  This section is designed especially, but by no means exclusively, for practicing linguists and those  interested in concentrated and advanced study of the English of the Appalachian region -- its pronunciation, grammar, and much more.  It connects the visitor to scholarly resources and documentation that have been created by the two hosts of this site and that can be found nowhere else.

 

  • Linguistic Articles
    Here you will find a harvest of recently published articles by linguists about various aspects of the English of Appalachia.

  • Links of Linguistic Interest
    These links will help anyone explore online resources about the speech of Southern Appalachia and about varieties of English spoken beyond its borders.

  • Annotated Bibliography on Southern Appalachian English
    Scholars and non-scholars have been writing about the region's speech for over 140 years.  This bibliography identifies nearly a thousand publications, briefly noting their content and what part of the region they pertain to.

  • Hall: The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain Speech
    Joseph Hall's Columbia University dissertation, published in 1942, remains the only detailed account of the pronunciation of an American region.

  • Montgomery: Grammar and Syntax of Traditional Smoky Mountain English
    This sketch surveys and amply illustrates the grammatical forms and structures found in traditional speech in and around the Great Smoky Mountains.  It is based primarily on the work of Joseph Hall in the mid-twentieth century.  

 

  • Wolfram and Christian: Sociolinguistic Variables in Appalachian Dialects
    This report surveys and describes grammatical forms and pronunciation from interviews in two counties of southern West Virginia.  It was condensed as the well-known volume Appalachian English (Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976).  
     

 

  • Transcription Protocol for CESME
    The Corpus of Early Smoky Mountain English (see below) was transcribed using a set of simple but comprehensive and well-tested principles for representing speech using no technical characters. 

  • Corpus of Early Smoky Mountain English (CESME)
    The Corpus of Early Smoky Mountain English is a compilation of refined, term-by-term transcriptions of Joseph Hall's 1939 recordings. It is prefaced by a discussion of Hall's fieldwork and an account of how the transcriptions evolved.

 

  • Known Transcription Issues
    No transcription of an extended portion of speech is perfect, and in some cases even the best trained, most-experienced linguists can disagree about exactly what they hear.  So for the record, we identify some places in CESME where people can listen and differ on what the recording says.

  • Archive of Traditional Appalachian Speech and Culture
    Coming soon ...

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