On the other hand, some words that most Americans mispronounce are always sounded correctly in the southern highlands, as dew and new (never doo, noo). Creek is always given its true ee sound, never crick. Nare (as we spell it in dialect stories) is simply the right pronunciation of ne’er, and nary is ne’er a, with the a turned into a short i sound.
It should be understood that the dialect varies a good deal from place to place, and, even in the same neighborhood, we rarely hear all families speaking it alike. Outlanders who essay to write it are prone to err by making their characters speak it too consistently. It is only in the backwoods, or among old people and the penned-at-home women, that the dialect is used with any integrity. In railroad towns we hear little of it, and farmers who trade in those towns adapt their speech somewhat to the company they may be in. The same man, at different times, may say can’t and cain’t, set and sot, jest and jes’ and jist, atter and arter or after, seed and seen, here and hyur and hyar, heerd and heern or heard, sich and sech, took and tuk—there is no uniformity about it. An unconscious sense of euphony seems to govern the choice of hit or it, there or thar.
Since the Appalachian people have a marked Scotch-Irish strain, we would expect their speech to show a strong Scotch influence. So far as vocabulary is concerned, there is really little of it. A few words, caigy (cadgy), coggled, fernent, gin for if, needcessity, trollop, almost exhaust the list of distinct Scotticisms. The Scotch-Irish, as we call them, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of to-day bears little analogy to that of Appalachia.
Scotch influence does appear, however, in one vital characteristic of the pronunciation: with few exceptions our highlanders sound r distinctly wherever it occurs, though they never trill it. In the British Isles this constant sounding of r in all positions is peculiar, I think, to Scotland, Ireland, and a few small districts in the northern border counties of England. With us it is general practice outside of New England and those parts of the southern lowlands that had no flood of Celtic immigration in the eighteenth century. I have never heard a Carolina mountaineer say niggah or No’th Ca’lina, though in the last word the syllable ro is often elided.
In some mountain districts we hear do’ (door), flo’, mo’, yo’, co’te, sca’ce (long a), pusson; but such skipping of the r is common only where lowland influence has crept in. Much oftener the r is dropped from dare, first, girl, horse, nurse, parcel, worth (dast, fust, gal, hoss, nuss, passel, wuth). By way of compensation the hillsmen sometimes insert a euphonic r where it has no business; just as many New Englanders say, “The idear of it!”
Throughout Appalachia such words as last, past, advantage, are pronounced with the same vowel sound as is heard in man. This helps to delimit the people, classifying them with Pennsylvanians and Westerners: a linguistic grouping that will prove significant when we come to study the origin and history of this isolated race.
An editor who had made one or two short trips into the mountains once wrote me that he thought the average mountaineer’s vocabulary did not exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and you shall find that even the illiterates among them have a range of expression that is truly remarkable. I have myself taken down from the lips of Carolina mountaineers some eight hundred dialectical or obsolete words, to say nothing of the much greater number of standard English terms that they command.
Seldom is a “hill-billy” at a loss for a word. Lacking other means of expression, there will come “spang” from his mouth a coinage of his own. Instantly he will create (always from English roots, of course) new words by combination, or by turning nouns into verbs or otherwise interchanging the parts of speech.
Crudity or deficiency of the verb characterizes the speech of all primitive peoples. In mountain vernacular many words that serve as verbs are only nouns of action, or adjectives, or even adverbs. “That bear ’ll meat me a month.” “They churched Pitt for tale-bearin’.” “Granny kept faultin’ us all day.” “Are ye fixin’ to go squirrelin’?” “Sis blouses her waist a-purpose to carry a pistol.” “My boy Jesse book-kept for the camp.” “I disgust bad liquor.” “This poke salat eats good.” “I ain’t goin’ to bed it no longer” (lie abed). “We can muscle this log up.” “I wouldn’t pleasure them enough to say it.” “Josh ain’t much on sweet-heartin’.” “I don’t confidence them dogs much.” “The creek away up thar turkey-tails out into numerous leetle forks.”
A verb will be coined from an adverb: “We better git some wood, bettern we?” Or from an adjective: “Much that dog and see won’t he come along” (pet him, make much of him). “I didn’t do nary thing to contrary her.” “Baby, that onion ’ll strong ye!” “Little Jimmy fell down and benastied himself to beat the devil.”