Figure 6. The percentage of third-person singular -s absence in African American speakers, by community and age.
Despite their invisibility in traditional portraits of Appalachia, African Americans have been a part of southern Appalachian culture since the eighteenth century. In fact, nearly 10 percent of the population of the Mountain South is African American.1 Even though the black population was much less dense than in the lowland, plantation South, African Americans in southern Appalachia were not cushioned from the social and political impact of enslavement and social subordination.2 At the same time, there were differences. Wilma Dunaway notes that in the Mountain South, slaveholdings per household were smaller than in the lowland South, more ethnic mixing occurred between African Americans and Native Americans, slaves were more frequently assigned to non-agricultural occupations, and there was heavier reliance on the labor of women and children. In this context, a number of small rural and some urban African American communities were established in southern Appalachia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and have stably existed since that time.3
Until the past decade, the speech of African Americans in the Appalachian range has largely been ignored or dismissed.4 Some of the oversight is attributable, no doubt, to the general cultural and sociohistorical oversight of blacks in the Mountain South, but some sociolinguistic circumstances contributed to this neglect as well. Notwithstanding the significant contributions of dialectologists and sociolinguists to the description of regional, social, and ethnic varieties of American English over the past half century, the field was lulled into accepting several sociolinguistic assumptions that may have contributed to the lack of attention to African American speech in this region.5 One of the conclusions that emerged from the early wave of sociolinguistic studies of African American English (AAE) was the observation that a common set of structural pronunciation and grammatical features characterizes the vernacular speech of African Americans, regardless of where it is spoken.6 It was assumed that AAE possessed a kind of homogeneity that united its use in different regional contexts and in urban and rural settings as well. As William Labov—arguably, the most influential voice on the study of AAE for more than four decades—put it, “By the ‘black English vernacular’ [AAE] we mean the relatively uniform dialect spoken by the majority of black young in most parts of the United States today, especially in the inner city areas. . . . It is also spoken in most rural areas and used in the casual, intimate speech of many adults.”7 From this perspective, it could be assumed that descriptions of AAE for the Mountain South would match those of AAE varieties elsewhere.
By the same token, analogous assumptions of homogeneity have been made about varieties of Appalachian English, and it has sometimes been assumed that there is a uniform language that extends throughout the Appalachian range. For example, Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, in one of the earliest descriptions of Appalachian speech, noted, “We use the term AE [Appalachian English] to refer to the variety of English most typically associated with the working class population,” and “many of the features we describe have relatively wide distribution within the central Appalachian range.”8 From such a perspective, it might be assumed that a general description of Appalachian English could be applied regardless of region and ethnicity in the Mountain South. In the words of Thomas Bonfiglio, the illusion of homogeneity “is largely a function of secondary revision that glosses over differences and constructs a linear metanarrative . . . there is something in the popular consciousness that desires to see a unity of geography, ethnicity, and language.”9 More recent descriptions of Appalachia emphasize the diversity of language within the Mountain South.10
Most studies of AAE have focused on the forms that are most different from standard American English (SAE), and there has been little study of how AAE is differentiated in different regions and within communities themselves. The traditional definition of AAE emphasizes its most nonstandard, or vernacular, variety, and most data-collection efforts center on how to access these vernacular forms instead of gathering data from a full range of community participants on the standard–vernacular continuum. Even standard varieties of English become idealized in the process of describing AAE, as if there were a unitary version of spoken SAE. A similar preoccupation has occurred in the study of southern Appalachian speech, where descriptions tend to focus on working-class speakers who are most distant from SAE, rather than speakers who represent the range of social strata within the community.11 In other words, researchers become preoccupied with describing the most vernacular varieties of Appalachian speech in a way that idealizes the so-called authentic vernacular speaker, rather than acknowledging the full range of variation among Appalachian speakers.12 In reality, identity, style, and politics intersect with the full range of language fluctuation that occurs in varieties of both Appalachian English and AAE, wherever they are found.13
There are several possibilities in terms of explaining African American speech in Appalachia. As Kirk Hazen points out, there may be shared features between African Americans and European Americans that make the speech of these groups indistinguishable in actual dialect use and undifferentiated in dialect perception.14 At the other extreme, we might find distinct varieties of English that demark a clear-cut ethnolinguistic boundary so that African American speech maintains the kind of sociocultural distinctiveness that has been noted in traditional sociolinguistic studies of AAE. Or there may be different constellations of shared and distinctive structures that are sensitive to the local context and to community dynamics. Of course, it is also possible that the speech of African Americans in the Mountain South is characterized by a range of language and social relations and that demographic, social, and sociopsychological factors intersect in defining the use of these language varieties in particular communities. Certainly, there is great diversity in the African American communities of Appalachia, making it difficult to generalize from community to community. Notwithstanding these differences, there may be other factors that unify African American communities in the Mountain South, such as the common imposition of segregation laws that led to separate schools, separate churches, and other forms of institutional and social segregation. As some African American scholars have pointed out, the underlying issue is one of race and ethnicity manifested in sociolinguistic diversity.15 Questions about African American speech in the context of southern Appalachia can be answered only by examining empirically some actual African American communities in this region.
We can consider the relationship of African American speech to local speech in the Mountain South by examining several types of diagnostic linguistics structures, that is, structures that set apart different regional, social, or ethnic groups. Before examining some of these representative variables, however, it is necessary to understand that although dialects are sometimes set apart by qualitative differences (i.e., one variety always uses a structure that another variety never does), they just as often exhibit quantitative differences in which language varieties are distinct in terms of the relative frequency of usage rather than the categorical absence or presence of a structural form. For example, all speakers of English sometimes use the form -in’ for the unstressed suffix -ing, as in swimmin’ for swimming or runnin’ for running. At the same time, some groups and individuals use the -in’ form significantly more frequently than others:16 low-status speakers may use it more than high-status speakers, men more than women, southerners more than northerners, and some southern mountain communities more than some southern lowland communities. Thus, certain dimensions of African American and Appalachian speech are defined by patterns of relative use rather than by categorical patterns of use or nonuse.
As an example, consider the relative absence of the third-person singular -s suffix in structures such as “She run” for “She runs” in some regional African American communities, including a couple in southern Appalachia. This feature is a common trait of AAE,17 but it is not commonly found in varieties of Appalachian English.18 Figure 6 summarizes statistics for the -s absence in five different communities: two of them, Beech Bottom and Texana, are located in the Appalachian mountain range of western North Carolina; two, Roanoke Island and Hyde County, are on the Outer Banks by the coast; and one, Princeville, is in the Coastal Plain region of North Carolina.19 The Appalachian community of Beech Bottom is located in the northwest corner of North Carolina in Avery County, about thirty-five miles southwest of Boone, along the Tennessee border. Settled in the 1870s, Beech Bottom has had an African American population ranging from 80 to 120. Since the early 1940s, however, due to the closing of feldspar mines and the mobilizing effects of World War II, the community’s population has been drastically reduced, and there are only a handful of African American residents remaining. Texana is a small African American community located high on a mountain about a mile from the town of Murphy in the Great Smoky Mountain region of North Carolina, near the Tennessee border. It was settled in the 1850s and currently has a relatively stable population of about 150 African Americans.
Figure 6. The percentage of third-person singular -s absence in African American speakers, by community and age.
The statistics in the figure are also divided on the basis of three age groups: older speakers, middle-aged speakers, and younger speakers. As figure 6 shows, the frequency of the absent third-person -s suffix is different among the three regions and is quite sensitive to generational differences as well. For example, -s absence is relatively rare—and receding—in the Appalachian African American communities but is quite common in the Coastal Plain community of Princeville, with the Outer Banks communities falling in between. Similar shifts across these communities have been found for other “core” AAE structures,20 such as absence of the verb be (e.g., “She nice” for “She’s nice”) and loss of a final stop consonant after another consonant (e.g., wes’ en’ for west end, col’ egg for cold egg). These findings suggest that features commonly included in the inventory of AAE structures may appear in Appalachian African American speech, but they are not nearly as stable and uniform as attested in non–Mountain South African American communities.
Considered next is a phonological variable that represents a different pattern: the absence of r following a vowel, as in fea’ for fear or ca’ for car. Traditional AAE varieties in both urban and rural contexts are described as predominantly r-less,21 whereas varieties of Appalachian English are typically described as r-ful, that is, speakers tend to pronounce the r in fear or car.22 Figure 7 depicts the relative incidence of postvocalic r-lessness in the same five communities considered in figure 6. For the sake of comparison, figures for r-lessness are also given for two cohort European American communities: one on the Outer Banks, and one in Appalachia. As in figure 6, percentages are given for three different age groups so that changes over time can be considered in the assessment of regional accommodation. The two Appalachian communities (Beech Bottom and Texana) have little r-lessness, much like their cohort European American communities. Furthermore, r-lessness rates show a relatively stable pattern in the Appalachian communities, with little change across the different generational groups. The patterning of r-lessness in communities in eastern North Carolina shows much more variability in time and place.
Figure 7. The percentage of postvocalic r-lessness in African American speakers, by community and age.
The preceding examples indicate that core vernacular AAE structures that differ from vernacular Appalachian English structures may be represented, but at significantly reduced levels in African American speech in the southern Appalachian range. This finding has been replicated in other studies; for example, Wolfram and Jeannine Carpenter found similar patterns for reducing consonant blends before a vowel (e.g., wes’ en’ for west end) and for the absence of be (e.g., “She nice” for “She’s nice”) among African Americans in different settings in the Mountain South.23 At the same time, many local and regional traits are assimilated in African American Appalachian communities. For example, the loss of r after a vowel (e.g., feuh for fear) aligns with the pattern found in the local Appalachian community rather than that found in other African American communities in the lowland South. Most speakers in Appalachian communities pronounce their r’s after a vowel, and African American communities in Appalachia tend to follow suit.
Alignment with local patterns is also found for vowels. Becky Childs conducted an extensive instrumental analysis of vowels in Texana and found that traits of southern Appalachian vowels are frequently adopted by African Americans,24 contra AAE vowel norms.25 For example, the southern vowel fronting in words such as boot and boat, so that they sound more like biwt and bewt, respectively, is common among African Americans in Mountain South communities, although it is not typically found in the core AAE system.26 Similarly, the ungliding of vowels in words such as right and ride by African Americans in southern Appalachia is more likely to follow the local pattern than the core AAE pattern found elsewhere. As noted by Erik Thomas, there are two patterns of reducing the glide—one in which the ungliding affects only vowels occurring before voiced consonants or syllable-final vowels (e.g., tahm for time, bah for bye), and a more general pattern in which the ungliding takes place before voiceless consonants as well (e.g., rahs for rice, raht for right).27 The more general version of this pattern is typical of southern Appalachian varieties, whereas the more restricted version is found in some regions of the lowland South and in urban areas.28 African Americans in southern Appalachia, however, are more likely to adopt the general version of this pattern, which is found in most southern Appalachian communities, rather than the typical AAE pattern.
The accommodation of local southern Appalachian vowel traits may be one of the reasons that African Americans in southern Appalachia are often misidentified as European Americans in ethnic identification tasks by outsiders. For example, two studies found that African American speakers in small African American communities in the Mountain South were consistently identified as European Americans by listeners in Raleigh, North Carolina.29 This misidentification may occur even when the speakers use some core features of AAE that are not found among European American speakers in Appalachia. This pattern underscores the significance of local accommodation by African Americans in southern Appalachia, as well as the significant role of vowel production in ethnic identification.
The picture that emerges from recent studies suggests that African American speech in southern Appalachia is somewhat different from that found in the canonical studies of AAE in large urban areas of the North and in lowland South regions.30 While some of the distinctive, core structures of AAE are evident, they appear to a lesser degree in southern Appalachia than in other regions. At the same time, African American speakers tend to adopt some local and regional dialect traits found among European Americans, particularly in terms of vowel production and some distinctive grammatical traits. Although the vocabulary has not been studied in detail, it appears that African Americans in the Mountain South also tend to accommodate distinctive local vocabulary items. Some southern highland dialect words—airish ‘breezy’ or ‘chilly’, holler ‘a valley between mountains’, and gaum ‘gummed up’ or ‘messy’—are typically known by both European Americans and African Americans in southern Appalachia. By the same token, some lexical items may be distinctive to the African American community, such as high yellow ‘light-skinned person’, ashy ‘dried, scaly skin’, and CPT ‘colored people’s time’. These items are often known only by members of African American communities in these regions. Thus, we see a pattern in which regional vocabulary items are shared, while African American communities may preserve some ethnically distinctive terms.
African American speech in the Mountain South is not a uniform variety; in fact, it may be characterized by great diversity based on demographic, social, and individual factors. For example, urban areas of southern Appalachia, with larger and denser concentrations of African Americans, are likely to show more extensive traits associated with core AAE and fewer local dialect traits compared with smaller rural areas. But it is not simply a matter of demography and population concentration. Aspects of cultural differentiation and ethnic identity are also symbolically reflected through language. Thus, Christine Mallinson and Wolfram contrasted the case of Hyde County, a historically isolated coastal community, with Beech Bottom, a historically isolated community in southern Appalachia.31 Whereas younger Hyde County residents showed a movement away from the local norm in favor of external urban AAE norms, the few younger speakers remaining in Beech Bottom accommodated the local dialect norms of their European American cohorts. Beech Bottom African Americans expressed a strong desire to put the racism of the past behind them and to gloss over the existing ethnic divide between whites and blacks; in fact, they self-identified as mixed race rather than African American. There was also a lack of a distinctive black youth culture in Beech Bottom, where African American youths were largely involved in local white culture. The converging cultural themes and activities led the movement toward a regional dialect norm, even as traces of a distinctive ethnolinguistic past continued to erode.
Finally, there may be differences in communities of practice within local African American communities. For example, in their study of Texana, a small African American community in the Smoky Mountains, Childs and Mallinson found that the linguistic practices of women there were best explained in terms of the different communities of practice in which they participated.32 One group, the “church ladies,” engaged in practices related to churchgoing and activities associated with cultural conservatism and “propriety.” The other primary group, the “porch sitters,” engaged in regular socializing on one group member’s porch, where they would listen to music and participate in activities indicative of affiliation with the more widespread African American culture, especially the youth culture. Differential social practices help explain why the porch sitters showed high usage levels for core features of AAE, while the church ladies showed low usage levels for these features and instead used language associated with the local southern Appalachian variety of English, as well as features of standard English.
African American speech in Appalachia cannot be reduced to a singular description any more than Appalachian English can be. There are regional differences; demographically based differences related to community size, gender, and social status; and cultural differences related to how ethnolinguistic differences are symbolically perceived and practiced in various communities. And of course, we cannot overlook individual differences: particular speakers choose to present themselves ethnolinguistically as either inside or outside certain communities. Notwithstanding these significant variables, we can conclude that many African Americans in the Mountain South reveal an identity that is both shared with and distinct from their European American cohorts. This identity reflects the complex ways that region, ethnicity, and culture intersect in the Mountain South, as well as the existence of past and current social interactions within and across communities.
Research reported here was generously supported by NSF grants BCS-0236838 and BSC-0843865. Thanks to Kirk Hazen and Mary E. Kohn for comments on a draft of this essay.
1. Richard B. Drake, A History of Appalachia (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2003); Dwight Billings and Kathleen Blee, “African-American Families and Communities,” in Encyclopedia of Appalachia, ed. Rudy Abramson and Jean Haskell (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006), 155–56.
2. Wilma A. Dunaway, Slavery in the American Mountain South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
3. Ibid.
4. See Christine Mallinson and Walt Wolfram, “Dialect Accommodation in a Bi-ethnic Mountain Enclave Community: More Evidence on the Development of African American Vernacular English,” Language in Society 31 (2002): 743–75; Becky Childs and Christine Mallinson, “African American English in Appalachia,” English World-Wide 25 (2004): 27–52; Christine Mallinson and Becky Childs, “The Intersection of Regional and Ethnic Identity: African American English in Appalachia,” Journal of Appalachian Studies 10 (2004): 129–42; Becky Childs, “Investigating the Local Construction of Identity: Sociophonetic Variation in Smoky Mountain African American Women’s Speech” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2005); Christine Mallinson, “The Dynamic Construction of Race, Class, and Gender through Linguistic Practice among Women in a Black Appalachian Community” (PhD diss., North Carolina State University, 2006); Kirk Hazen, “African American Appalachian English,” in Abramson and Haskell, Encyclopedia of Appalachia, 1006.
5. Walt Wolfram, “Sociolinguistic Myths in the Study of African American English,” Linguistic and Language Compass 1 (2007): 288–313; Walt Wolfram, “The African American English Canon in Sociolinguistics,” in Contours of English and English Language Studies, ed. Michael Adams and Anne Curzan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 34–52.
6. See William Labov, Philip Cohen, Clarence Robins, and John Lewis, A Study of the Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers in New York City, final report, research project 3288 (Washington, DC: U.S. Office of Education, 1968); William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972); Ralph W. Fasold and Walt Wolfram, “Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect,” in Teaching Standard English in the Inner City, ed. Ralph W. Fasold and Robert W. Shuy (Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1970), 41–86; Walt Wolfram and Robert W. Fasold, The Study of Social Dialects in the United States (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1974).
7. Labov, Language in the Inner City, xii.
8. Walt Wolfram and Donna Christian, Appalachian Speech (Arlington, VA: Center for Applied Linguistics, 1976), 29.
9. Thomas P. Bonfiglio, Race and the Rise of Standard American (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002), 62–63.
10. Hazen, “African American Appalachian English,” 1006; Kirk Hazen, Paige Butcher, and Ashley King, “Unvernacular Appalachia: An Empirical Perspective on West Virginia Dialect Variation,” English Today 26, no. 4 (2010): 13–22. See also the essay by Hazen, Flesher, and Simmons in this volume.
11. Wolfram and Christian, Appalachian Speech, 29; Michael B. Montgomery and Joseph S. Hall, eds., Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004).
12. Mary Bucholtz, “Sociolinguistic Nostalgia and the Authentication of Identity,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (2003): 398–416.
13. Hazen, Butcher, and King, “Unvernacular Appalachia,” 13–22.
14. Hazen, “African American Appalachian English,” 1006.
15. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Ann Marie Mann Simpkins, Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005); Geneva Smitherman, Word from the Mother: Language and African-Americans (New York: Routledge, 2006).
16. Kirk Hazen, “(ING): A Vernacular Baseline for English in Appalachia,” American Speech 83 (2008): 116–40.
17. John R. Rickford, African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, and Educational Implications (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
18. See Wolfram and Christian, Appalachian Speech, 29; Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.
19. Figures are adapted from the following sources: for Princeville, Kenya D’Andrea, “The Shifting Significance of 3rd Singular -s Absence as Compared to r-lessness” (unpublished manuscript, North Carolina State University, 2005); for Hyde County, Walt Wolfram and Eric R. Thomas, The Development of African American English (Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); for Roanoke Island, Jeannine Carpenter, “The Lost Community of the Outer Banks: African American Speech on Roanoke Island” (MA thesis, North Carolina State University, 2004), and Jeannine Carpenter, “The Invisible Community of the Lost Colony: African American English on Roanoke Island,” American Speech 80 (2005): 227–56; for Beech Bottom, Mallinson and Wolfram, “Dialect Accommodation”; for Texana, Childs and Mallinson, “African American English in Appalachia,” and Mallinson, “Dynamic Construction.”
20. Walt Wolfram and Jeannine Carpenter, “Trajectories of Change in African American English” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Albuquerque, NM, 2006).
21. Fasold and Wolfram, “Some Linguistic Features of Negro Dialect,” 41–86; Labov, Cohen, Robins, and Lewis, Study of Non-Standard English of Negro and Puerto Rican Speakers; Rickford, African American Vernacular English; Green, African American English.
22. Wolfram and Christian, Appalachian Speech; Montgomery and Hall, Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English. See also the essay by Hazen, Flesher, and Simmons in this volume.
23. Wolfram and Carpenter, “Trajectories of Change in African American English.” See also the essay by Hazen, Flesher, and Simmons in this volume.
24. Childs, “Investigating the Local Construction of Identity.”
25. Erik R. Thomas, “Phonological and Phonetic Characteristics of AAVE,” Language and Linguistics Compass 1 (2007): 450–75.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Walt Wolfram, “The Grammar of Urban African American Vernacular English,” in Handbook of Varieties of English: The Americas and Caribbean, ed. Bernd Kortmann and Edgar Schneider (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004), 111–32.
29. Mallinson and Wolfram, “Dialect Accommodation,” 743–75; Becky Childs and Christine Mallinson, “The Significance of Lexical Items in the Construction of Ethnolinguistic Identity: A Case Study of Adolescent Spoken and Online Language,” American Speech 81 (2006): 3–30.
30. Wolfram, “Grammar of Urban African American Vernacular English,” 111–32; Guy Bailey, “The Relationship between African American Vernacular English and White Vernaculars in the American South: A Sociocultural History and Some Phonological Evidence,” in Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, ed. Sonja Lanehart (Philadelphia and Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001), 53–92; Patricia Cukor-Avila, “Co-existing Grammars: The Relationship between the Evolution of African American and Southern White Vernacular English in the South,” ibid., 93–128.
31. Mallinson and Wolfram, “Dialect Accommodation,” 743–75.
32. Childs and Mallinson, “Significance of Lexical Items,” 3–30.