During some light reading I found this interesting paper on the Dialects of American English.

For those friends who also speak Appalachian English I have quoted the relevant material below, however I recommend you read the entire paper too. I swan! Itsa good read.

 One island of early Scotch-Irish English speech was left behind and preserved during the push west.  This special, archaic variety of English is known as Appalachian English.  It preserves many archaic features that date back to earlier stages in the development of English in Britain.  Forms thought to be substandard today are actually the outmoded standard of yesterday.  A good example is the use of double negatives such as ‘not nobody.’  Linguists have dubbed this variety of English as “American Old English” or “American Anglo Saxon”.  Other mountainous, relatively isolated areas of the American East show a similar preservation of archaic speech.  Mario Pei, a popular writer on linguistics, said that “The speech of the Ozarks comes closer to Elizabethan English in many ways than the speech of modern London.” 

Main features–

–pronouns: hit (it), youns, (ye ones–Chaucer), (possessives) hisn, hern, yorn, theirn  them used as an adjective in place of their; them boys.

–Retention of preposition in the progressive aspect: I’m a talking to you.

–propensity to use compound nouns: men-folk, man-child, kin folks

–exchanging parts of speech in comparison to standard English: It pleasures me, That was mighty fetchin’ of you, She prettied herself up, I’ll muscle it up (lift it up), He bigged her (made her pregnant); He daddied that child.

–Many colorful idioms.  Slow as Christmas (slow in coming about), slick as a peeled onion (sly), His backbone’s rubbin’ his belly. (very hungry).

–fixin to, pert near, afeared, beholden (indebted), took sick, upped an, mess of (lot of)

–Rhyming euphemisms: swan, swanny = swear, land sakes alive, golly, dad blamed. 

–Special distance words: This here, that there, that yonder.

–bag called sack; dragonfly  called mosquito hawk, green bean called a snap bean; pail called a bucket.

      Some southern features from the poorer classes are shared with the dialects of the rural midwest since poor southerners helped colonize the midwest.  Also, some features of Appalachian English are shared with the speech of poorer southern whites for the same reason.

–ain’t, use of double negatives–older “correct” version of English, avoided by the upper classes, who chose the innovative single negatives preferred by the British upper classes.

–ng = n: somethin, nothin, (also found in Scotch-Irish dialects of middle English: Celtic languages had no ng)

      The “Scots-Irish” dialect of southern English mingled with Cherokee and other Native American languages in a band running from western North Carolina to Oklahoma and East Texas, giving rise to the so-called backwoods, or highlands, southern dialect, which is more faster and high-pitched than tidewater southern and more nasal than Appalachian English. Some of the phonological features of the backwoods southern dialects undoubtedly come from Cherokee and other Native American languages.  The south was the only area in the East where Native Americans mixed significantly with the whites.  This occurred mostly with the poorer whites on the frontier.  Substrate features include: nasality, tensing of vowels [e] instead of [E] rather than diphthongization as in Tidewater Southern English.

Influence on General American–

– highly expressive idioms: He can lick his weight in wildcats.  Faster ‘n greased lightning, can’t hold a candle to, sharp as a tack, madder ‘n a wet hen, tuckered out.

–Some words widely assumed to be of Appalachian origin are not: the word moonshine was coined in England, ‘hooch’ is of Native American origin.  Words like redneck, cracker, hoosier were coined in Northern England and brought over; originally, they were not necessarily insults. The derogatory term Hillbilly was coined only in early 1900’s.

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