LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.05.01 (02) [E]

[Lowlands-L]

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A=Afrikaans Ap=Appalachian B=Brabantish D=Dutch E=English F=Frisian
L=Limburgish LS=Lowlands Saxon (Low German) N=Northumbrian
S=Scots Sh=Shetlandic V=(West)Flemish Z=Zeelandic (Zeêuws)
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From: Montgomery Michael <ullans at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.04.30 (03) [E]

Dear Sandy

To follow up my previous email to the list with a few
points:

> From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
> Subject: "Language varieties" [E]
>
> As a Scots speaker, I actually find it very hard to
> see any evidence of
> Scots influence in Appalachian speech or writings at
> all. It seems rather to
> be full of features from the south west of England.
> So is general American
> speech, but Appalachian has more. It does make me
> wonder why linguists
> rarely seem to even mention Wessexian when
> discussing American speech. Are
> they just not aware of those dialects of England? I
> also wonder what
> American linguists mean by "Scots-Irish"? It seems
> to be a way of being
> vague more than anything else.

Sometime ago the literary critic Cleanth Brooks wrote
a few things about similarities in pronunciation
between southwest England and the American South
(citing the Southern drawl, for example), but these
were highly impressionistic.  It is true that American
linguists in general have virtually no knowledge of
"Wessexian" (could you give us 2-3 good references on
this variety to have at hand?) and have no doubt
underestimated its possible influence on American
varieties.  But this deficiency this does raise an
important question: what do we know about the speech
of southwest England in the 17th century, when
settlers from there came to Virginia and prsumably
laid the groundwork for southern American English?  In
my own comparative research I rely primarily on
historical dictionaries, so use the English Dialect
Dictionary, the Scottish National Dictionary, etc.
They have much 18th and 19th century material, which
helps avoid the problem of time gap in comparing
modern-day varieties.  However, extracting information
about pronunciation from them is quite difficult and
next to impossible for general phonological
tendencies.

An important point is that so much of American
pronunciation is new, especially in the American South
and even in the supposedly conservative, "isolated"
varieties in Appalachia.  The merger of vowels in
"pen/pin" and "hem/him" and the monophthongization of
/ay/ to produce "mah raht sahd" (i.e. "my right side")
are developments of the 19th century -- for all
intents and purposes absent from the earliest
recordings we have of speakers born in the 1840s/50s.


The term "Scots-Irish" (or "Scotch-Irish," as we
usually say) refers to the inheritance from Ulster
emigrants, who came in significant numbers (at least
150,000) in the colonial period.  Most of the
inheritance of a linguistic nature goes back to, or at
least is shared with, Lowland Scotland.  The question
of American or Appalachian linguistic connections to
Ulster was stymied for a very long time by the lack of
resources, a situation greatly improved in recent
years by the appearance of two dictionaries, the
_Concise Ulster Dictionary_ (1996) and _The Hamely
Tongue_ (1995, 2nd edition 2000), and other sources.
Fifteen years ago comparisons between Ulster and
America were next to impossible; the only study of any
merit was by Alan Crozier, a native of County Tyrone,
published in _American Speech_, the journal of the
American Dialect Society, in 1984.  What we now need
is a renaissance in publication on other varieties in
the British Isles, especially regional ones in
England.  Is a good dictionary of Wessexian a
possibility?

Sandy states that he would not "trust a researcher in
American forms of English who concentrates on Scots
forms, especially if he uses an umbrella termlike
`Scots-Irish'."  I take him to imply some important
cautions: that one who seeks trans-Atlantic
coneections by considering only Scots forms will
inevitably produce a skewed, inaccurate picture and
further that one must consider various possible
sources and rule out alternatives before choosing a
particular source.  Such a methodology is the hallmark
of good, reliable scholarship that follows where
evidence leads rather than seeks evidence to support a
pre-conceived view.  Such an approach is much more
demanding and time-consuming than simplistic
comparisons (such as Appalachian vs. southwest
England), but only it permits us to see the big
picture of the transplantation of English (and Scots)
abroad.

Having said all this and knowing Sandy's fervor for
texts, let me make a recommendation or two about some
from Appalachia.  Start with the novels of Denise
Digardina (such as _Storming Heaven_), Wilma Dykeman
(_The Tall Woman_)  or Jesse Stuart.  In connection
with my _Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English_ I hope
to construct a website having transcripts and sound
files of traditional speakers from Tennessee and North
Carolina.  So stay tuned for that.  Unfortunately
there's nothing comparable to scotstext.org.

With regards

Michael

> However, I've mentioned this before - you might want
> to check some of my
> previous postings:
>
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0012A&L=lowlands-l&P=R522
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0110B&L=lowlands-l&P=R1110
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0206C&L=lowlands-l&P=R4523
>
> I wouldn't myself trust a researcher in American
> forms of English who
> concentrates on Scots forms, even less if he uses an
> umbrella term like
> "Scots-Irish". He needs to show that he's well
> aquainted with the English of
> the south west of England before he can be
> considered competent in analysing
> American Englishes.
>
> Sandy
> http://scotstext.org/

----------

From: Montgomery Michael <ullans at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Language varieties" 2004.04.30 (04) [E]

Dear Ron, Ed, Sandy et al.

I'm aware that this issue has "badgered" Lowlands-L
for a wee while, but I'm hear to tell you folks that
there is plenty of evidence of a discernible, yes even
a strong, connection between Appalachian English on
the one hand and the speech of Ulster and Scotland on
the other.  The Scotch-Irish character of southern
mountain speech is something I've been researching
since 1988 and have written quite a bit about.  The
connections are indeed next to non-existent in
phonology (the area of language that has generally
been addressed on this list), but they are numerous
for grammar and by no means insignificant for
vocabulary.  Here are references to three papers I've
published on the topic:

1996. "How Scotch-Irish is Your English?" _Journal of
East Tennessee History_ 67: 1-33.

1997. "The Scotch-Irish Element in Appalachian
English: How Broad? How Deep?" in _Ulster and North
America: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives on the
Scotch-Irish_, edited by Curtis Wood and Tyler
Blethen, 189-212. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama
Press.

2001. "The British and Irish Antecedents of American
English" in _Cambridge History of North America: North
America_, edited by John Algeo, 89-153. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

Grammatical connections include double modals ("might
could", "might can", etc.), "all the" (= the only, as
in "that's all the one I have"), and "whenever" to
refer to a single event in the past (as in "I was
sixty-five whenever I retired").

As noted in a previous email, I have a forthcoming
dictionary with more than 300 terms (mostly
vocabulary) in American English that can be attributed
to Ulster.  I'll agree that, impressionistically
speaking, people from Appalachia don't sound like
they're from Ulster or Scotland in pronunciation,
intonation, etc., and that if anything they do sound a
bit like southwestern English folks  But there's
plenty of evidence elsewhere.

The idea of a Scotch-Irish connection to Appalachia is
not an "uneducated guess among non-linguists."  The
overwhelmingly popular notion among them is that
mountain speech is Elizabethan.  The Scotch-Irish
connection has rarely been explored by either
laypeople or scholars.

There was much variation in settlement groups in
different parts of Appalachia, but by far the three
largest groups were the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, the
English (primarily from southern England), and the
Germans.  Welsh and Cornish settlers were few except
to some parts of Pennsylvania, and then only after the
mid-19th century.  Appalachia was settled primarily in
the 18th century.

Maybe this will throw some light on the issue at hand.
 It's not a myth!

With regards

Michael Montgomery

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Language varieties
>
> Ed (above):
>
> > This question has badgered the List for many years
> now, hasn't it Sandy?
>
> Indeed (though my name isn't Sandy).
>
> On the basis of what I know about the varieties we
> are talking about, I have
> to state that the "Scotsh-Irish" theory doesn't make
> a lot of sense, while
> Sandy's hunch connecting Appalachian with English
> varieties of Southwestern
> England makes a lot more sense to me.  I wouldn't be
> one bit surprised if
> this "Scotch-Irish" derivation hypothesis simply
> started as an uneducated
> guess among non-linguists who thought that
> Appalachian didn't fit into any
> other American dialect group and wasn't like England
> English either, thus
> must be from the "periphery," i.e., Scotland and
> Ireland.  (The stereotype
> of the poor Appalachian mountain dweller may have
> added to this, given that
> especially early Irish immigrants were mostly very
> poor and were exploited
> and discriminated against.)
>
> It seems to me that average Americans has no idea
> about the great diversity
> of England's dialects, associate only southeastern
> and "posh" English
> "accents" with England.  Rhotic dialects of Western
> England come as a real
> surprise to them and tend to be assumed to be "Irish
> or something like
> that."
>
> Isn't it true that there was a lot of mining in the
> Appalachian mountains,
> and that that attracted many immigrants from Wales
> and Cornwall?  (There are
> telling names, such as Cornwall Bridge.)  I suppose
> that mining job
> opportunities attracted people from other parts of
> Southwestern Britain as
> well, such as from neighboring Devon, Somerset,
> Dorset, Wiltshire and
> perhaps Berkshire and Hampshire.  This would make
> sense with regard to
> Appalachian dialect genesis as well.
>
> On a slightly different note, I am often surprised
> to discover or be
> reminded how many phonological similarities there
> are between Lowlands Saxon
> (Low German), especially the North Saxon dialects,
> and the dialects of
> Sussex, Wessex, Kent and in part Essex, and (in
> extension?) dialects of
> Australia and New Zealand (e.g., non-rhotic, /ar/ ->
> [a:], /a/ lowering
> before /l/, /t/ and /d/ flapping, strong aspiration
> only initially,
> widespread absence of aspiration non-initially ...).
>  Is it accidental that
> this coincides with these being dialects of
> England's former Saxon-ruled
> area?
>
> Regards,
> Reinhard/Ron

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