Language of The Southern Highlanders

The region inhabited by the Southern Highlanders has been called the Southern Mountains, Appalachian America, Elizabethan America, Shakespearian America, and so on. Its inhabitants have been referred to as “our contemporary ancestors.” The language of these people has been labeled Old English, Early English, Elizabethan English, Scottish, Irish, Scotch-Irish. Roughly speaking, the region extends from Maryland to northern Alabama, including parts of Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Its area is about that of the British Isles, and its population around five millions. Our study can not therefore be complete or exhaustive. The investigation is made more difficult by the fact that the highlander's language varies in different sections of the highlands, and frequently even in the same community. In West Virginia and in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia numerous Scottish survivals are found; further south they are not common. Thus one meets with different types of dialect in the novels of Charles Egbert Craddock, for Tennessee, Will N. Harben, for Georgia, John Fox, Jr., for Kentucky and Virginia, and Lucy Furman, for Kentucky. The language of Percy McKaye's plays is in no way similar to that of any section of the Southern highlands. The linguistic peculiarities noted in this study have been picked up here and there over the highland section during the past twenty years; as a high-lander from Kentucky, I had heard many of them myself from childhood.