Dictionary of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountain English 

Michael B. Montgomery and Jennifer N. Heinmiller

ullans2000@gmail.com

jknheinmiller@gmail.com

Abstract

This report describes the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain and Southern Appalachian English, a forthcoming work of lexicography based on historical principles. It discusses the dictionary’s relationship to the earlier Dictionary of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountainn English and to the Dictionary of American Regional English. Setting out the scope, the primary practices, the purposes, and many other features of the dictionary, this report discusses how the work relies on previously untapped written and spoken sources, including Civil War letters and extensive recorded interviews from an oral history project and how it seeks to capture the speech of one of America’s most reputed cultural areas. 

Introduction. The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountainn English (Montgomery and Heinmiller forthcoming; hereinafter DSASME), now under contract and under final review at the University of South Carolina Press, is an outgrowth of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Montgomery and Hall 2004; DSME) and is an expansion of the earlier work geographically and chronologically. By incorporating DSME and adding further material from East Tennessee and Western North Carolina, the most concentrated focus of DSASME remains on that part of Southern Appalachia most thoroughly documented and arguably having the greatest salience nationally and internationally. 

The Smokies. Much had already been written about “the Smokies” by the time Great Smoky Mountains National Park was established in the 1930s (Bridges et al. 2014 contains 1300 references). In part because formation of the park displaced thousands of residents from an 800-square-mile territory, that process resulted in massive, unprecedented documentation of the human and natural life of an area featuring a more diverse ecosystem than any other of its size in the country. That documentation has continued apace to the present day, with the national park attracting researchers from every direction and well nigh every field of investigation.

Beginning in 1937, these researchers included Columbia University graduate student Joseph Sargent Hall (1906–1992), a Californian embarking on what would become a half-century of observing, recording, and compiling the speechways and traditional lore of the few older residents granted life-time leases to remain and many other former residents who had sold their homes and property to settle in communities nearby. Friendships forged and Hall’s curiosity led to periodic onsite collecting of folkloric material as varied as witchlore and dance parties.

In addition to hALL'S 1942 dissertation, several articles, and three popular books of anecdotal material, Hall in his later years prepared a 500-entry typescript glossary, with the intention of depositing it in the Library of Congress for later scholars. In a 1990 visit to Hall, who had retired to Oceanside, California, Montgomery agreed to carry that glossary forward through a comprehensive reading program and to develop a full-fledged dictionary of the mountainous region along the Tennessee-North Carolina border. What resulted fourteen years later and a dozen years after Hall’s death was DSME. Hall’s collections furnished the core of the volume, whose front matter detailed the characteristics (age, level of schooling, level of literacy, types of employment) of every speaker from whom he collected. The dictionary included an extensive sketch of morphology and syntax and other unprecedented features. The Smokies are at the center of a folk culture whose salience, breath of documentation, and wide interest beyond the immediate area justified the relatively small geographical compass of the 2004 volume. 

The relation between DSASME and DSME. As the successor work, DSASME retains every significant feature of DSME. The proportion of entries derived from Hall’s collections has decreased from more than twenty percent to less than ten, with the sequel enlarging most entries and adding thousands more to comprise a projected 10,000 (four of which are presented in the Appendix) and 35,000 citations—60 percent more material than DSME[1]. DSASME encompasses parts of eight states, basing its demarcation of Southern Appalachia in large part on that of the Appalachian Regional Commission, from southern West Virginia to northeast Alabama[2]. Every reasonable effort has been undertaken to canvass material from or about this territory to produce the first comprehensive dictionary of an American region based on historical principles, one extending from the late-eighteenth century to the turn of the present one.

            Three ways in which DSASME greatly augments and improves historical coverage can be highlighted: rich coverage of the mid-nineteenth century through nearly 2,000 citations from manuscript letters from the ongoing Corpus of American Civil War Letters project; a reading program encompassing hundreds of published sources, including many read by the editor[3] after being identified in the now-completed Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE); and the editing of entries to produce a systematic chronological spread of citations, with the aim of one every fifteen to twenty years in the twentieth century.           

            To ensure capturing as much research and commentary on the English of the eight-state region as possible, the editor has read in their entirety the hundreds of popular and scholarly publications on the region’s speech listed and annotated at his website (Appalachian English[4]). Especially before the last quarter of the twentieth century, this literature dealt overwhelmingly with unusual elements—the archaic as well as the colorful and innovative—making the speech of Southern Appalachia perhaps the most widely recognized rural English in the United States. Its frequent use by writers of fiction requires that sources be carefully evaluated and citations discriminated for validity and originality. Drawing on experience from throughout the editor’s life and career, DSASME exercises particular caution in citing fiction. That said, it extensively utilizes the works of many authors native to the region, most notably ones from Eastern Kentucky (including Harriet Simpson Arnow, James A. Still, and Jesse Stuart).

            The bibliography for DSASME stands at roughly 2,000 items, not counting individual letters, recordings, and other units of larger sources and collections. As with DARE, its entries are sometimes encyclopedic, representing a general reference work that documents speech from a vast range of walks of life, perspectives on the world, social habits and patterns, and more. Traditional culture occupies center stage, for which DSASME produces a collective picture more complete and detailed than does any other source, including the hefty Encyclopedia of Appalachia (Abramson and Haskell 2006). The dictionary’s exhaustive pursuit of subject-area sources, undertaken by visiting libraries and archives in person or through shelf searches online, has tracked down far more items from or about the region than DARE could have done. Many of these are rare, disseminated locally, or, especially in recent years, self-published. The English of Southern Appalachia has long been represented in literature and popular media as both distorted and artificially uniform, giving rise to stereotypes—not infrequently to caricatures— about its form and usage and to misconceptions about its history. It is not surprising that in reality this speech is much more heterogeneous than popularly perceived. Further diversifying the speech documented in DSASME is the fact that Southern Appalachia is larger than generally perceived. It lacks natural or political boundaries, unlike the territory on which other regional works of lexicography have been based. Yet fordictionary purposes, boundaries are required in order to determine whether a given source qualifies for citation.

Here the county-by-county demarcation of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) has been a steady guide except for some fuzziness on the northeastern and southwestern extremes of the region[5]. For Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States data, the ARC map indicates from which counties in Tennessee and Georgia to draw citations. At the same time, ARC confirmation points to areas needing sources to balance coverage, with North Georgia being perhaps the most conspicuous example. Publications from the well-known Foxfire Project in northeasternmost Georgia promised riches, and the editor was able to track down an extensive set of its early quarterly magazine, only portions of which were used for the better-known series of anthologies published by Doubleday Anchor. Further, works cited by DARE suggested two relevant post-bellum authors from northwestern Georgia: Charles Henry Smith and Will Harben, whose writings were tracked down and read in extenso.

In being a comprehensive historical record of the region’s English, DSASME goes beyond conventional lexicography in numerous ways. Extensive use of manuscripts is just one of these. In addition to the Civil War letters already referred to, the dictionary draws eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evidence from letters, diaries, wills, church minutes, and petitions in manuscript form, as well as from transcriptions published in local historical and genealogical journals. For late-twentieth-century evidence, the dictionary gives primacy to citations directly from recorded oral history interviews of traditional speakers chosen from eleven areas of Southern Appalachia. These interviews, transcribed for the editor’s in-progress Archive of Traditional Appalachian Speech and Culture project, provide more than 3,000 citations for DSASME.

In the field of English lexicography, the proportion of oral material may be unrivaled, with the possible exception of the Dictionary of Newfoundland English (Story et al. 1990). A particular emphasis of DSASME is morphosyntax, meaning that suffixes, phrases, word-order patterns, and other elements of grammar have been fashioned into dictionary entries more so than in any other dictionary of English. Such material is brought together in a section of front matter that represents the most extensive account of morphology and syntax of the region’s speech to date.

The relation between DSASME and DARE. Some discussion is required of the relation between DSASME and DARE, works that have been symbiotic for more than two decades. The editor conferred with his counterparts at DARE through on-site visits in 1994 and 1997 and has maintained frequent contact ever since. Much of his grasp of lexicographic practice and theory comes from Frederic Cassidy, Joan Houston Hall, George Goebel, and their ever-helpful-knowledgeable colleagues at DARE’s home base, the University of Wisconsin at Madison. At innumerable turns, as in entry style and the division of senses, DSASME has relied on DARE for guidance and precedence. As already stated, DARE identified many sources that would otherwise have escaped the editor’s attention. Through the nationwide survey it undertook in the late 1960s, DARE has provided more than 500 citations, and DSASME cross-references nearly 2,000 regional labels that DARE assigns to terms and senses. For example, when DARE posits the range of an item to be “South Midland” (as big ‘pregnant’), DSASME notes this within brackets at the foot of the relevant entry paragraph. DSASME adopts a somewhat simpler format for citations than does DARE. At the head of each one, DSASME usually provides four elements: a date of publication in bold, the last name(s) of author(s) in regular type, an abbreviated title in italics, and a page number (if pertinent), as seen here: 

            1881 Pierson In the Brush 73

DARE includes up to three other elements for the citation: an identifying location in bold (usually a state, less often a sub-region), a pertinent time frame if it significantly predates publication, and a comma, as seen here:

            1962 Dykeman Tall Woman 190 sAppalachians (as of 1877),

When these details can be judged, DSASME usually gives the sub-regional location for a citation and the time period of a source in an annotation at the bibliographical entry, a practice followed to reduce redundancy between entries and to allow for other pertinent information in the bibliography. In its only alphabetic volume published since 2004, DARE V (Sl-Z) borrows more than 150 citations from DSME[6]. Reciprocally, DSASME borrows many citations from DARE when this is deemed useful, as from the vast Gordon Wilson Collection (c1960)[7].  

The culture and speechways of Southern Appalachia. The status of the culture and especially the speech of Southern Appalachia is complex and conflicted, even bifurcated. The conflict is encapsulated in the ways natives and others evaluate the speech associated with Appalachia.  The region prompts negative images and perceptions—of poverty, poor education, and other social ills. Yet it embodies the acknowledged, widely imitated, often cherished heartland of traditional rural American culture as expressed in music, storytelling, and much more. For many in the region, their speech marks their identity and their attachments.  For much of the country and indeed abroad, Southern Appalachia is synonymous with authenticity. Admired for its inventiveness, color, and variety, mountain English attracts the curiosity of a large population beyond those who study it or, as the readership of DSME showed, those accustomed to browsing a dictionary of any kind. Too often scorned and depreciated by mainstream, metropolitan culture and its values, Appalachian English has long needed and deserved the comprehensive treatment that the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountainn English will provide, the proper understanding that the dictionary will promote, and a higher status for both this speech and its speakers.

References 

Abramson, Rudy, and Jean Haskell, eds. 2006. Encyclopedia of Appalachia. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Bridges, Anne, Russell Clement, and Ken Wise, eds. 2014. Terra Incognita: An Annotated Bibliography of the Great Smoky Mountains, 1544–1934. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Cassidy, Frederic G., and Joan Houston Hall, eds. 1985–2012. Dictionary of American Regional English. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Montgomery, Michael B., and Joseph S. Hall. 2004. Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

Montgomery, Michael B., and Jennifer Heinmiller. Forthcoming. Dictionary of Southern Appalachian and Smoky MountainEnglish. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.

Story, G.M., W.J. Kirwin, and J.D.A. Widdowson, eds., 1990. Dictionary of Newfoundland English, 2nd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. http://www.heritage.nf.ca/dictionary/

Appendix

Sample Citations for the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountain English

Running go illustrates the challenge of lemmatizing folk vocabulary having no precedent in great historical dictionaries or in Webster’s Third. DARE chooses running go as its headword, based perhaps on parallelism with the synonym running start or on its predominance among citations, though that form, found in three of its eight citations, postdates run-an’-go by four decades. DSASME displays greater variety of forms (6 vs. DARE’s 4), meaning that it cannot fall back on frequency as the decisive criterion. DSASME attests an intriguing variety of ways speakers who have probably never seen the word written have analyzed (or as Jespersen says, “metanalyzed”) the series of three syllables they hear, while at the same time apparently agreeing on its sense.

The entry for care is important for the idiom I don't care to, which non-natives to the region tend to misinterpret as a negative response, i.e. “I don't want to” rather than “I wouldn't mind at all to.” Just as in DARE, citations instantiate both usage and commentary on usage, in this case the confusion the idiom has generated. Thus, one can translate “a lot of mountain people are kind of backward, but I don’t care to talk to nobody” as “many mountain people are somewhat shy, but I don't mind talking to anyone.”

Cat shaking represents an entry that, like more than 2,400 others, relies on citations to do the defining. Encyclopedic as well as lexicographic, such an entry references a regional custom, practice, or the like. To be sure, the tossing of a cat to foretell one’s future mate is now obsolete, as is much of the traditional culture documented in DSASME, but this fact contributes to the uniqueness of the dictionary.

According to DARE, swarp is a term distinctly Appalachian in distribution. It appeared in DSME only in its basic sense of “to strike, thrash.” To some minds familiarity with the fourth verbal sense indicates one's fluency in the regional vernacular. To the practice of citing or cross-referencing an earlier history in England, Scotland, or Ireland, the entry for swarp neatly illustrates three “historical principles”: 1) arrangement of citations by date within a paragraph; 2) arrangement of senses by their presumed development between paragraphs within a given part of speech; and 3) arrangement of parts of speech by their presumed development within an entry. Especially because of the comparatively shallow time-depth of DSASME, few entries illustrate all three principles, notably 2).