Howdy, and welcome to this website devoted to the speech of one of the country's most interesting but most often misunderstood regions—southern and central Appalachia, which stretches from north Georgia to West Virginia.  Some have romanticized the English spoken there as the language of Shakespeare and admired its authenticity and inventiveness.  Others have scorned or dismissed it as uneducated, bad grammar, or worse.  Too rarely has it been appreciated for what it is—the native speech of millions of Americans that has a distinguished history and that makes Appalachia what it is just as the region's extraordinary music does. 

At this site you'll find a wealth of information and resources about Appalachian English (aka Appalachian Speech).  There's enjoyment to be had in exploring, but if you're looking for a site that's just for entertainment or one with funny spellings, you've come to the wrong place.  Too many of them are around already.  As two natives of East Tennessee who have heard hill speech for a long time and have written about it, we have designed this site to present not only how Appalachian people talk, but also some of the history and the flavor of that talk.  It focuses especially on the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina, but the speech of the Smokies is typical of much of what you'll hear elsewhere in the region, though not as strongly as a couple of generations back. 

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Why a site on "Appalachian English"? Read more 

At this site, we've built three sections, or 'suites':

The first one, General Interest, has pages of broad, general interest or that concern the entire region. You'll find links and articles to explore and meet some interesting people. From time to time, we will spotlight one of the links or articles.  Our first spotlight is on the West Virginia Dialect Project, directed by Kirk Hazen at West Virginia University.

The Smoky Mountain Suite is devoted to the pioneer researcher Joseph Sargent Hall (1906-92).  Here you will find lots of information about him and about the material that he collected: interviews and stories he recorded in 1939, and a Glossary to accompany the Hall recordings. 

The Linguistic Suite is where you'll find a passel of resources especially for specialists: more articles and links, a bibliography, studies of pronunciation and grammar, the Corpus of Early Smoky Mountain English (a searchable compilation of Hall transcripts). 

In short, we've designed this site to help anyone learn more about the speech of Appalachia.  The bibliography of a thousand sources is the most comprehensive listing to be found anywhere.  There's no search engine for it right yet, but because the bibliography is mostly annotated, you can perform on-screen searches for all kinds of things—names, places, linguistic features, and expressions. 

Do you have comments about this site or perhaps suggestions for expanding?  Contact us at appalachianspeech@gmail.com or at ullans2000@gmail.com.  Or write to Michael Montgomery, at the English Department of the University of South Carolina, Columbia SC 29208, with any suggestions or queries.