In this week's bonus, guest host Valerie Fridland talks to Allison Burkette, a linguist at the University of Kentucky, about the features we think of as Appalachian and where they actually turn up. We look at why "Elizabethan English in the mountains" is a myth, what a-prefixing sounds like, and why that "a" may have started life as a preposition. Then we look at why a-prefixing appears in Linguistic Atlas interviews out West, why some Canadian speakers say "y'all" when they're talking about Americans, and why the accent isn't dying, just changing.
In this week's bonus, guest host Valerie Fridland talks to Allison Burkette, a linguist at the University of Kentucky, about the features we think of as Appalachian and where they actually turn up. We look at why "Elizabethan English in the mountains" is a myth, what a-prefixing sounds like, and why that "a" may have started life as a preposition. Then we look at why a-prefixing appears in Linguistic Atlas interviews out West, why some Canadian speakers say "y'all" when they're talking about Americans, and why the accent isn't dying, just changing.
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Valerie Fridland: Hi, Grammarpaloozians. Welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. I'm Valerie Fridland, and I am filling in for Mignon this week. Today on the show, I'm talking with Allison Burkette, who's a linguist and professor at the University of Kentucky. Now, her work explores language variation, dialects, and the different ways that language reflects our regional and cultural identities. She's done a lot of really cool stuff. If you want to hear all the great things she's done, then go tune in for our regular episode where I go down her bio.
But today, I want to start with some really fun work that Allison has done on different dialects within the South. In our main episode, we talked a lot about different words for things that you've studied and a lot of your linguistic atlas work. But you've done a lot of different things, and one of the really fun areas that you've worked on is Appalachian speech. So I thought we'd dive into that a little bit because, first of all, a lot of people don't even know how to say that word. Did I do okay? Tell me about the debates that there are surrounding its pronunciation, and maybe the insider way to say it?
Allison Burkette: Yes. Well, first off, thanks so much for having me. I've enjoyed talking with you. In terms of how you say the name of the region, "Appalachia" is what those of us who either are from there or are adjacent to there say. You do hear some people say "Appalachia," and that's normally how you know someone is not from there or doesn't have people from there. So "Appalachia."
Valerie Fridland: So it's "Appalachia" and "Appalachia" are the two main. And then isn't there sometimes "Appalachia"? I think there's also the "sh" and "ch" difference, too. It seems like there's lots of alternativ. I've read somewhere that sometimes it depends where on the Appalachian Trail that you are, that maybe when you're more north, there are actually more variable pronunciations. But typically in the South, right, it's the pronunciation that you were suggesting.
Allison Burkette: It is, and I think a lot of people don't realize that the Appalachian Mountains actually range from, like, southern New York State to northern Alabama. I mean, this is a massive mountain range. What I do know is that when a lot of people think about Appalachia, they kind of think about the central region. They kind of think about West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina. They think about that sort of central region, and those are the people who are probably going to be the most likely to call themselves Appalachian.
Valerie Fridland: And then what are some of the myths we have? Because you're right, there are certain ideologies that we have or these beliefs that we have when we hear that word and think of the people from that area, even though you're right, it's such a huge area that we're not possibly thinking about all those people. But there are a lot of myths surrounding that, and people get a lot of stuff wrong about the speech in that area. What can you tell us about what you know people make mistakes about?
Allison Burkette: Well, I think one of the things you hear most commonly is that people from Appalachia speak Elizabethan English, or they speak Old English, or whatever term they're using for English spoken in England a really long time ago. That kind of feeds into this idea that the Appalachian region is isolated, both economically, socially, and politically, which is simply not the case. If you look at the history of the region, it has never been completely politically, socially, or economically isolated. It's just one of the stereotypes that goes along with Appalachia. So I think that another myth that you hear, certainly about Appalachian speech, not only is it Elizabethan or Chaucerian—I mean, you hear the entire gamut basically of the history of English could be found in Appalachia, apparently. You also have people with this idea that the people that speak there or live there are not educated, or they don't speak in a way that's educated, or they have a lot of grammar errors or whatever kind of mistakes in their language. Of course, as linguists, we know better than that. We know that people talk the way that they talk for a reason, and in this particular case, it could be that someone is using an Appalachian dialect because that's where they're from, and that's how they identify themselves. Last, I would say that—and this is something, Valerie, that linguists will do, too, on occasion—is we'll treat the region like it is a homogeneous whole, and that if you have a description of Appalachian English, that applies to all of the speakers. Even if you just narrowed it to that central Appalachian region that I was saying most people kind of think of if they think of Appalachia, even if you narrowed it down to that, there is going to be variation in the way that people speak across even that small subsection of the Appalachian region. Linguists for a while had been guilty of this as well, talking about Appalachian speech like it's a thing. But now we tend to refer to Appalachian Englishes. We go ahead and put a plural on there just so that we are recognizing and noting the fact that just because you're from Appalachia doesn't mean you speak one particular way, and that we have just as much variation as anywhere else. We have that within Appalachia. I think those are just the big language-based myths or stereotypes of Appalachia.
Valerie Fridland: And I think that's something that we see everywhere. We have this idea of Southern speech. People talk about it as if it is a monolithic creation, but there are many different Southern Englishes, and that's just one variety of it. So I think one of the things we have to think about, too, is age, and how it has changed language over time for all of us. So if you live in any urban area particularly, we don't hear a lot of the regional accents like we used to. Those are fading out. How is it in that area of the Appalachian Englishes? What have we found, and can you tell us maybe a few of the features that have typified some of those varieties that people might be able to get a feel for the accent or the dialect, and then what is still around, and what are kind of relic or lost features?
Allison Burkette: Yeah, sure. I think one of the most common features associated with Appalachian English is A-prefixing, so when somebody puts an "a-" before an "-ing" verb. Saying like, "We went a-hunting," or "I grew up a-fishing." Even though I grew up a-antique shopping, which you can't say because it doesn't sound right. It doesn't follow the rules for using A-prefixing. But I think that's one of the most stereotypical or common. That or saying, "We was," or "They was," which, as you well know, you can find all across the South. To be fair, there are not a lot of features that are found only in Appalachia, and I think that's something that people who study regional dialects would be very quick to point out, is that rarely do you have a feature that is only used by these people, only in this particular place. It's more a matter of a dialect being a combination of features that is associated with a particular region or a particular group of people. But A-prefixing would certainly be what springs to mind in terms of an Appalachian feature that a lot of people would go to first, and people still use it. I hear younger people, people younger than me, who use A-prefixing. Sometimes it might just be a matter of context.
I actually did my dissertation interviews in Appalachia, and I interviewed members of my extended family. So I interviewed people that I hadn't even necessarily met before, or maybe they saw me when I was a baby or something like that, but they knew that I was related to them. That was kind of my way to get in the door and make my way around a network of extended family. Even though my dissertation was a long time ago at this point, I still, even at that time, had a speaker who was in his 30s who used A-prefixing, which, if you think, "Oh, this is something that's dying out," would be surprising even then. But the way that he used A-prefixing was different from the way, for instance, his father and mother, who I also interviewed, used A-prefixing. He used it in storytelling, so he used it to make a point. He used it to make a point about how, even though he was telling a ghost story that's a generic regional ghost story—like the one where you're going down the street, or going down the road, and you see a woman, and she needs a ride, and you pick her up, and you take her to a place, and then she's disappeared by the time you got there. He used an A-prefix to tell that story, like, "There was a woman a-standing beside the road," and then, "They were a-driving down the road." But he didn't do it in normal conversation when we were just talking about people or talking about events around town. Whereas his parents, and certainly his grandparents, would use it across all parts of conversation, not just in narratives. So, my thought… At the time, I honestly did not have a concept of necessarily what was going on. I was really confused by what I found. Years later, a lot of reading later and a lot more interviews later, it occurred to me that this was a way for younger speakers to take part in older traditions without having to work on the farm, without having to do the old-fashioned things, but then they could still sound like they were from there and give a regional context to stories that didn't necessarily belong to that region. That's a way to express that part of their identity.
Valerie Fridland: I see. So kind of when they were embodying that cultural identity as a narrator of a story that was tied to that place. Sort of like code-switching when you have speakers of a different language, and they're talking about something that they experienced in their home language or in their home culture. I've found that then you often get this code-switching. My parents used to do that because they were native French speakers, and when they talked about something they had done in Montreal, they would often shift into French because that experience kind of was that identity for them. So what you're saying is kind of for younger speakers who might inhabit more identities as being someone that's less tied to that Appalachian cultural identity than their parents—because that is something that I've had a lot of people that are parents in Appalachia tell me they're really worried because they feel like the accent is dying, and to them, that accent is really a big part of who they are and what represents that identity. So this is a sort of way to hold onto that in those contexts where it's relevant.
Allison Burkette: Exactly. Exactly. I truly do not think that the accent is dying, but I think that maybe what people are hearing is the fact that it's changing, and the fact that you've got younger speakers who use a lot of the features associated with their age group across the country. Like speakers who use "like" as a quotative. That's really common among the Appalachian kids as well. They'll say something “such as”—you see how I didn't do it there, but now I'm going to do it as an example.
Valerie Fridland: It's hard now.
Allison Burkette: I know, I want to do it, too. But they say something “Such as, I was talking to my friend, and she was like this, and then I was like that, and then we were all like, 'Wow!'" You're going to hear that in Appalachia, too. But I think if you do have an older speaker who has in mind, "Hey, things are fading. People don't do stuff the way that they used to," they might hear that and think, "See? People aren't using Appalachian English anymore. They're not talking the way that I talk or my family talks or my parents talked." But it's not dying. It's just changing.
Valerie Fridland: Right. Because if they had gone 100 years before they were babies, it would have sounded very, very different, right? That's what we tend to forget, and that's sort of what I remind people when I say, "Yeah, studies do show that some of those traditional regional features that we think of as Southern or New England or New York accent features are fading in younger generations, but that doesn't mean they're not being reconstituted into another variety that's also unique, just like it has done every century or two in the United States over time." If you go back 300 years, people would not have sounded like they do today, and I'm sure there was a period where parents back in the 1800s were like, "Oh my God, young people today don't sound anything like what we do." Exactly. One thing you mentioned was verbs, a lot of verbs. Like in Appalachian speech, you have A-prefixing, you have like "we was." Can you tell us a little bit about the history of where those forms come from?
Allison Burkette: In theory, and it's hard to know for sure, but best guess—and this was a lot of Michael Montgomery's work—best guess is that the A-prefix was originally a preposition. So if you read Shakespeare and you see a line that says something like, "We were going to go there on tomorrow," or "We did that of a night," those prepositions were used in ways that we don't do anymore, but it could be that basic sound of the preposition, that "ah" sound, stuck around, and it stuck around before a verb, which is where it could very well have been used. That's where it came from. You usually hear an A-prefix in front of that progressive verb, so an "-ing" verb, but that's not the only time that it comes. You also see it in—like I had a speaker tell me that they were "a-scared" of storms, or that they had a relative that was "a-scared" of thunderstorms. So that preposition does hang out, or what could have been a preposition, that "a-" does hang out in other places as well, which I think kind of backs up this idea that it's been passed down, kind of as a distilled version of a preposition.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and I've actually heard it from speakers from that area, "come a-Sunday," "come a-Monday," that kind of thing where it's not just a verb. Again, "on Monday," "on Sunday," that makes a lot of sense. Actually, when I studied progressive forms of verbs and the history, because progressive verbs are actually a relatively new thing—using them in a progressive sense like we do to mark continual action like, "I'm going every day to the store," which is a continuous action versus a one-time thing where you'd say, "I went to the store." There were some really old data from even Old English where you would use an "on" plus an "-ing" verb to mark a place, so, "he is on hunting," which we would today say, "he is hunting." So that's also further evidence for what you're talking about, where that "on" gradually, just because it's not really a word that we say with a lot of emphasis or stress, that over time, you know how we say "that old man," you don't say "old man," you drop off those sounds so that "on" just became "a-", then you get "a-hunting." And so now you have it with the verbs.
Allison Burkette: I think that it's a really good point because you also will hear A-prefixing in songs like "Froggy Goes A-Courting," because that's the example that I come up with.
Valerie Fridland: But, me too. Well, more like hearkening back to Tinder being related to Kindle, right? So Tinder, Kindle, a-hunting. I don’t even know why. A-courtin’.
Allison Burkette: Yeah, maybe it was just on my mind. But, you'll hear it in songs, and it could be included in songs because they want to keep a particular beat, and they need that unstressed just to add a different beat, an additional beat to that line. So I think it was just able to fly under the radar because it's not usually stressed. It's usually "a-hunting." It's not "A-hunting," it's "a-hunting," and you've got that stress on the beginning of the verb, so it just kind of got to slip through time and stay attached to progressive verbs and some other words.
Valerie Fridland: What I think a lot of people don't know is that actually that was widespread in the colonial period, so it's not just speech in that area. That's just where it was retained longer. But when you look at old data, you find things like, not like "a-fixing," because that does seem to be more Southern, but "a-going." You would find that all over the colonial period, all over the different colonies, correct?
Allison Burkette: We found A-prefixing in California in the '60s. So we have Atlas data that has people using the A-prefix, not just all across the United States, but even in more recent interviews in places where you would not expect it, like the West Coast. This is way more widespread than people think it is. And in fact, Sally Tagliamonte and I have done some work looking for Southern features—not necessarily Appalachian specifically, even though you could split some hairs about that, but looking for Southern features in her data from Ontario. One of the things that—oh, and they've got A-prefixing there, too. It's not as common, for sure, but it's there. But she had a bunch of younger speakers using "y'all." I think that a lot of us recognize, either in music or you hear interviews with people who aren't from the South, and you will still hear them say "y'all." Sally and I kind of figured that it's still trying to communicate something, not necessarily about the person being Southern, but the person pointing to something associated with the American South. For example, she had a speaker say something about the United States and a particular political issue, and the speaker was like, "I don't know why y'all care." That was the only time that speaker used that particular word, and I think it was… It was a young male speaker. I think he was trying to communicate this stereotype about the South as being politically conservative, and so would say, "I don't know why y'all care." That "y'all" does that kind of identity work, not necessarily for the speaker, but for how the speaker is characterizing other people. Does that make sense?
Valerie Fridland: Sort of as separate, kind of like distancing himself by using that term that isn't native to his language.
Allison Burkette: Exactly. Exactly.
Valerie Fridland: Well, it's interesting because Sally has actually been on Grammar Girl, so if people want to hear more about the work she does—because it's very similar, very interesting kind of work. But I love that you two have worked together on things like that. I actually am out West, and I have heard a lot of young speakers use "y'all" as well, and I think maybe different from Canada, where I can totally see it being a more divisive strategy of, "y'all down there in that part, we're separate politically and economically and everything," that that is used in that distancing way. I think that makes a lot of sense. My young speakers here, a lot of my students will say, "I don't know what y'all are doing over there, but come on over," where it's really more like just that sort of cool cachet of solidarity and friendship that I think the South brings up, and I think that's part of the reason why "y'all" has become so popular, because it's definitely not just a Southern thing anymore. Whether you hear it authentically, I think could be argued by people in the South that it's not used quite the same way, but definitely I hear a lot of young speakers using "y'all" everywhere. So that is a way that language changes over time.
Allison Burkette: Yes. Yes, and you kind of took the words right out of my mouth. Basically, I was going to say that another part of that stereotype of Southerners is that they're kind of relaxed, a little bit laid-back, maybe not in a hurry to do things, or friendly or hospitable. So it's not just that a word would be tied to one aspect of a stereotype or an idea, but that it could be used in multiple ways and multiple layers of when you've got something that's associated with a region or a group of people.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and if you're 20, a lot of times something that's relaxed and kind of expressing camaraderie is very attractive to you, which is why we see that kind of transgression of boundaries, right? Where you take it from a different group because it represents not that group anymore—like it's not Southern necessarily, but it's some trait that you associate with the South, which is that friendly, down-home, country, relaxed kind of vibe that I think has become very popular. Sort of like country music has become so popular, and a lot of times when you look at rural areas and how their speech has changed, it's actually picked up some of those Southern features because I think that's an identity that people enjoy and like to kind of present.
Allison Burkette: Absolutely. Because when my collaborator, Lamont Antieau, and I looked at A-prefixing in the Atlas data, he did some Atlas interviews in the early 2000s out in the middle Rockies, and he had a lot of speakers who used "y'all" and A-prefixing and other features associated with Southern or Appalachian English. Because his data was tape-recorded, an entire interview, we were able to go back and look at the specific instances of where people used A-prefixing and what that context was. What we found is that the vast, vast majority of A-prefixes were used for things like weather. They were used for things like "a-hunting," "a-fishing." They were used with outdoor activities, things that did have to do with farms or ranches. We kind of figured that it was a way for these people, even if they didn't live in the South, to kind of reference outdoor stuff, farm stuff, old-fashioned stuff. So it kind of points to that as opposed to being something that would be expected there.
Valerie Fridland: Right, and then it kind of makes sense that you can perform that identity without it necessarily being who you are. Living in the Rocky Mountains, it might seem odd, but if you're using it in those contexts, it feels more authentic. Just another great example, as we've talked about, of how culture is really revealed through the way that we say things, not just what we say, but how and when we say them. I love that. And for anybody listening that was wondering about our joke about Tinder, we're not on the app, but we did talk about the relationship of Tinder to fire-starting words, which was a relationship I never had thought about in the full interview. So if you're curious about that, go check that out. Okay, Allison, three book recommendations that you have that our listeners might enjoy?
Allison Burkette: Okay. I spent some time, and I had to really think about this because I have fallen down on my quest to read more for fun, but I'm trying to ramp it back up. I just finished "The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo," and so I'm finally on the Taylor Jenkins Reid bandwagon because I thought it was fantastic. It was a good story. So I would recommend that. I would recommend anything by Mary Roach. She's a creative nonfiction writer. Her most recent book is "Replaceable You," and it's fantastic. So I love her and would recommend that.
Valerie Fridland: That sounds interesting. I'll check that one out.
Allison Burkette: And then the last one is just kind of for fun, "Squeeze Me" by Carl Hiaasen.
Valerie Fridland: I love that title. I have all sorts of questions about that book. I might have to go check it out for sure. Allison, thank you so much. This has been such an enlightening, fabulous, and fun conversation. I really appreciate you joining us today. And if the listeners have any questions about where to find you, can you t- point their, them into the right direction?
Allison Burkette: Yes, you can find me, well, actually, you can find me on Instagram. But, you can find, you know, information about the Linguistic Atlas. Honestly, you can find good information about the atlas on Wikipedia. We had my graduate students, we did a lot of updating, and so if you just want some basic information on the atlas, Wikipedia's not a bad place to go. There's also linguistikatlas.org, and there is a GitHub repository. Happy to give you the QR code for that if anybody wants to actually jump into data.
Valerie Fridland: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Again, it's been a blast.
Allison Burkette: Thanks. I really enjoyed it.