LL-L: "Offline resources" LOWLANDS-L, 14.FEB.2000 (03) [E]

[Lowlands-L Administrator]

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 L O W L A N D S - L * 14.FEB.2000 (03) * ISSN 189-5582 * LCSN 96-4226
 Posting Address: <lowlands-l at listserv.linguistlist.org>
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 A=Afrikaans, Ap=Appalachean, D=Dutch, E=English, F=Frisian, L=Limburgish
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From: Michael Montgomery <N270053 at VM.SC.EDU>
Subject: {OMITTED}

Dear Sandy,

You inquire about resources on Appalachian.  There are no
comprehensive works of the type you seek.  For vocabulary, there
are glossaries produced by non-linguists of various degrees of
expertise and seriousness and for grammar, works produced for
teachers, such as Wolfram and Christian's 1976 book that you
mention and the following reference:

Brandes, Paul D., and Jeutonne Brewer. 1977. Appalachian
Amerenglish.  Dialect Clash in America: Issues and Answers.
Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow, 251-311. Mainly for teachers, this chapter
synopsizes settlement and cultural history of the region and gives
a non-technical sketch of distinctive syntactic, phonological,
lexical, and nonverbal communication patterns of Appalachian
speakers. Extensive bibliography.

For phonetics, far and away the best source is

Hall, Joseph Sargent 1942. The phonetics of Great Smoky Mountain
speech. American Speech Reprints and Monographs, No. 4. New York:
Columbia University Press. Study based on observations and recorded
material collected between 1937 and 1940, covering stressed vowels,
unstressed vowels, and consonants, but little attention to social
variation.

I have recently given a bibliography to a colleague at West
Virginia University to post on the web.  It includes around 400
items in the annotated format exemplified in the two sources above.
I trust that it will be helpful in many ways, but it does not
provide what you seek because those works do not exist.

This situation is the rule for American dialects.  There are no
comprehensive descriptions of any regional, social or ethnic
varieties that I can think of.  Linguists have focused on selected
features rather than seeking comprehensive accounts.  Even the
massive literature on African-American English covers only a small
portion of the features of that variety.

Whatever the reasons for the lack of resources on Appalachian, the
situation will improve in the foreseeable future when two volumes
I am completing are published.  One is the _Dictionary of Smoky
Mountain English_ (co-edited with the late Joseph S. Hall), and the
other is a grammatical sketch of Smoky Mountain English based on
material in the dictionary and several hundred hours of tape
recordings.  The dictionary, which will contain around 7,000
entries and 700,000 words of text, will be submitted for press
review shortly.  The grammatical sketch is a year or two away from
completion.  The Smoky Mountain area of Tennessee and North
Carolina is a relatively small part of Appalachia, but in most ways
its language is representative of a much larger region.  It has
taken me ten years to analyze just the material from the Smokies.

Michael Montgomery, Department of English, University of South
Carolina, Columbia SC 29208

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