Tennessee Becomes the First State to Recognize and Honor Appalachian Dialect

Tennesee lawmakers passed a resolution on March 26, 2019, which states that Appalachian English is a "fully legitimate dialect and most deserving of the respect afforded other dialects of American English."

The full story and details of the resolution can be found here and here (click!). 

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YALL Project (University of Kentucky)

We have initiated a new long-term, large-scale, collaborative research endeavor called the Young Appalachians’ Living Language (YALL) Corpus. This project entails building a monitor corpus of Appalachian language data featuring audio-aligned transcripts of original interviews with young people from across Appalachia, focusing in its initial implementation on Appalachian Kentucky. The project is designed not only to provide a large collection of much needed sociolinguistic data from the Appalachian dialect region for linguistic research purposes, but also to provide a representation of Appalachian speech to the interested public through a website designed for community outreach and education. One of our main goals is to capture the variation that exists among young people in Appalachian today. Typical depictions of Appalachian language cast it as arcane and frozen in time, but this project allows us to highlight the vibrant and ever-changing nature of speech as it lives in the present. A monitor corpus, designed to build a longitudinal collection of data for this specific language community holds the potential to reveal ongoing, long-range changes in progress in Appalachian varieties. The project also seeks to establish a set of standards and best practices for the development of richly annotated corpora for sociolinguistic analysis of spoken language; and the tools
developed for both the construction and presentation of this corpus will be designed for wide application in other projects dealing with linguistic variation. Such a toolkit is currently lacking in the field at large.

Having just begun this work in the last year, we have a growing collection of interviews and have begun the transcription process. We presented the initiation of the corpus at the Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) meeting in Cincinnati in 2018. Jessica Holman, a PhD student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, is currently using the data in her dissertation research that is examining stance and Appalachian identity. Some of this work will be presented at the upcoming ASA meeting in Asheville in 2019.

Jennifer Cramer

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Linguistic Potpourri 1, 2, and 3 at the Appalachian Studies Association Annual Meeting (submitted!)

AppalachiA'ville

March 17-19, 2019, Asheville, NC

For conference information, please go to appalachianstudies.org

Potpourri 1 - Syntax Across the Region abstract

• Language Variation in Appalachian: A special case of sentence meaning (Blanchette, Flannery, and Jackson)
• The haves and have nots of have and no have: How Appalachian langauge fits into the cross-linguistic picture (Tortora, Santorini, and Johnson)
• Clauses and Conjunctions: Do they reveal a speaker of Appalachian English? (Montgomery)

Potpourri 2 - Perception and Use abstract

• Understanding perceptions of Appalachian Englishes (Cramer)
• Continuity and Change in Ohio English: South Midland, General Midland, or Appalachian? (Flanigan and O'Malley)
• Linguistic Change and Subregionality in Appalachia (Childs and Hasty)
• Linguistic Hybridity and the Construction of Pipeline Resistance verbal repertoires (Puckett)

Potpourri 3 - Language, Identity, and Education abstract

• A constellation of sounds: Phonetic aspects of Appalachian Englishes (Reed)
• 'I always thought I was Southern?': Stance in Appalachian Identity negotiation (Holman)
• Language and belonging on the college campus (Dunstan)
• Applying linguistics in Appalachian educational contexts: Historical and current initiatives (Reaser)

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