28.3528, FYI: Appalachian English Website

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-3528. Fri Aug 25 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.3528, FYI: Appalachian English Website

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Date: Fri, 25 Aug 2017 15:49:31
From: Paul Reed [pereed1 at ua.edu]
Subject: Appalachian English Website

 
We are pleased to announce the launch of the website Appalachian English,
which presents and provides a small library of resources to study the region’s
speech. Housed at the University of South Carolina, the site can be found at
 artsandsciences.sc.edu/appalachianenglish

The hosts (Michael Montgomery at U of SC, Paul Reed at U of Alabama)
gratefully acknowledge USC’s College of Arts and Sciences for accommodating
this site.

More perhaps than for other parts of the U.S., Appalachian English has
captured the interest of linguists, educators, and others for well over a
century. Our bibliography identifies 1000 publications. However, this material
is scattered and often is either difficult to find or unknown. Our site brings
much of it together and provides avenues for linguists and the public to study
and to learn about the fascinating, but often mischaracterized, English of
Appalachia.
Some of the site’s resources are: 

- Joseph Hall’s 1942 monograph ''The Phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain
Speech''. Seventy-five years after publication, this volume remains the only
full account of the pronunciation of an Appalachian English variety. It is a
remarkable achievement still of great value to students of the region's
speech.

- Michael Montgomery’s “Grammar and Syntax of Smoky Mountain English,” from
his 2004 Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.

- Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian’s “Sociolinguistic Variables in Appalachian
Dialects,” the larger research report that formed the basis for their book
Appalachian Speech (1976).

- All 28 entries from the Language section of the Encyclopedia of Appalachia,
with entries ranging from African American English to language ideology, from
medical terminology to moonshining terminology, from place names to speech
play.

- An exhaustive bibliography of both scholarly and popular literature,
identifying the date and area studied for each item and in most cases
furnishing a brief summary annotation.

The heart of the site is the traditional speech of the Smoky Mountains of
Tennessee and North Carolina, through remarkable recordings of 62 people made
by Joseph Hall in 1939. We have transcribed these recordings to the most
refined and faithful degree possible, following a well-established
transcription protocol and using the speech signal to disambiguate forms. With
the backdrop of displacement of people by formation of the Great Smoky
Mountains National Park, Hall traversed the rugged area using aluminum and
plastic disks to create a record of stories and local lore from people aged 18
to 95. This age distribution provides excellent opportunities to study change
in progress. The accounts include vivid turn-of-the-century bear hunts and
much more. The transcriptions of individual speakers, each with a brief
demographic profile, are accompanied by audio versions and links to terms of
interest to a 400-entry glossary featuring capsule histories of terms. 

The site provides a composite transcription of Hall’s speakers that we have
named CESME, the ‘Corpus of Early Smoky Mountain English’. At 53000 words, the
multi-generational corpus is relatively small, but as a body of early recorded
and transcribed material from one area, it is unique. The posting of Hall’s
material fulfills a promise made at the 2012 Southeastern Conference on
Linguistics in Lexington, Kentucky. The site tells the story and provides an
account of Hall’s research through a 1990 interview with him. Not to be missed
are two of the many musical selections he recorded that formed part of a
Grammy-nominated CD.

Among many other things, the site presents issues of the perception and status
of Appalachian speech that might seem to involve only academic debate, but
that tap into popular discussion, such as the exact boundary of the region and
the pronunciation of Appalachia.

We hope that the Appalachian English website will stimulate further study,
provide resources for educators, and help all to better understand the
diversity of American Englishes.
 



Linguistic Field(s): General Linguistics
                     Historical Linguistics
                     Lexicography
                     Morphology
                     Phonetics
                     Phonology
                     Sociolinguistics
                     Text/Corpus Linguistics

Subject Language(s): English (eng)





 



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