Mountain Talk

Smoky Mountain Speech

If These Hills Could Talk -- Speech

in the Great Smoky Mountains

The people of the Smoky Mountains speak a colorful, twangy mountain talk that reflects their history and geography. Christine Mallinson, Becky Childs, Bridget Anderson and Neal Hutcheson tour these linguistically rich hills. (The research cited in this essay was first published in 2003.)

Driving the steep and windy roads along the border of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee, it is easy to see why the Cherokee Indians who first settled in this mountainous region named it the "place of blue smoke." The trademark of these hills is the ever-present blue-gray mist that casts a hazy glow over the dense fir and spruce pine covered landscape. The Smoky Mountains, or the "Smokies" as they are known locally, are a well-known destination for tourists from across the United States. At the same time, the lush forest, underground caves, and natural water sources provide a veil of cover under which one could easily fade into the backdrop of the mountains -- as notorious fugitive Eric Rudolph did for nearly five years. The terrain has played a major role in the development of mountain life and culture, and continues to be a source of past and present local tradition.

Stereotypes abound about the people who call Appalachia their home. The common assumption is that it is a region lacking in racial and ethnic diversity, populated mostly by whites of European ancestry. But the Smoky Mountains and Appalachia in general were actually settled by diverse groups of people. Coming to the area around 1000 A.D., the Cherokee Indians left a strong legacy; Oconoluftee, Nantahala, Hiwassee, Cheoah, Junaluska, Cataloochee, and Cullowhee are just a few of the places whose names pay homage to the Smoky Mountains' Cherokee settlers. Today, many flourishing communities of Cherokee Indians and other Native Americans still reside in the Smokies. For example, the Snowbird Cherokee in Graham County, North Carolina, continue to preserve their distinct ethnic and cultural identities as Native Americans and actively maintain their ancestral language. The tiny community of Snowbird contains nearly one-third of the total Cherokee-speaking population in the eastern United States, making it a significant community in the preservation and transmission of the Cherokee language and culture.

In addition to Native American groups, European Americans of varying ancestry -- Scotch-Irish, English, German, Polish, Swiss, Portuguese, Spanish, French and more -- have populated the Smoky Mountain region since the late 1700s and early 1800s. Likewise, some African Americans were also brought to the area as slaves of these white settlers, but independent, non-slave African American settlements have also existed in Appalachia since these earlier times. One small community, called Texana, was established in the Smoky Mountains as early as 1850. Located high on a mountain about a mile from Murphy, North Carolina, Texana was named for an African American woman named Texana McClelland, who founded the first black settlement in the area. Today the community has about 150 residents who still live along the same mountain hillside where the original inhabitants first settled.

Diversity and geographic isolation allowed for "mountain talk" to develop

As these diverse groups of white, black, and Native American founders settled in the Smoky Mountain area, they all brought with them many different ways of speaking. Because of the extreme ruggedness of the high country's terrain, the relative inaccessibility of the Smoky Mountains allowed these different dialects to blend together in isolation over the past several centuries and develop into a distinct regional variety of speech that is often called "mountain talk." Typically, outsiders who visit the area comment on the "twang" that they hear in locals' speech. Indeed, many Smoky Mountain English pronunciations are quite different from the speech that travelers might hear in the North, in the Midwest, as well as other regions of the American South.

Pronunciation

Many of the vowels of the Smoky Mountain dialect are quite distinct from other English varieties, even those in Southern English. While these differences may sound strange to some people, these qualities give mountain talk a distinct character or, as one early dialectologist put it "a certain pleasing, musical quality...the colorful, distinctive quality of Great Smokies speech." One feature noticed by newcomers to the area is that Smoky Mountain speakers often lengthen certain vowels and break them into what sounds like two syllables. For example, the "eh" sound in the word bear may sound more like bayer, and the short "i" sound in a world like hill may come to sound more like heal. In another example, which tends to be found in the speech of older mountain folk, the short a vowel can split and turn into a diphthong, usually before f, s, sh, and th sounds, so that a word like pass would sound like pace and grass like grace.

Another vowel characteristic of Smoky Mountain English speakers is their pronunciation of long "i." The typical Smoky Mountain "i" is a broad, unglided version of "i," so that the word bright would approximate the sound of the word brat and right would almost sound like rat. When "i is followed by an r, for example, the "ire" sound may sound more like "ar," so that fire or tire will be pronounced as far or tar by Smoky Mountain speakers.

The r sound is an important feature of Smoky Mountain English

The r sound is also an important feature of Smoky Mountain English. In contrast to some Southern English varieties that drop their r's, as in deah for deer, Smoky Mountain English is primarily an r-pronouncing dialect. Moreover, in certain cases, mountain speakers may sound like they are even "adding" r's to words where standard varieties do not use them. For example, visitors to the Smokies may hear winder for window, feller for fellow, and yeller for yellow. Another pronunciation trait affects other vowels at the ends of words, so that extra and soda are pronounced as extry, and sody. In fact, it was not uncommon for us to hear older mountain speakers refer to a soft drink or soda pop as sody water.

Grammar

Differences in pronunciation are not the only distinguishing traits of Smoky Mountain English. Distinct grammatical features characterize