With all that’s going on every day at the hands of the Trump Administration, it feels silly and out-of-touch for me to blog about something like regional dialects; however, I don’t want my blog to turn into just a political sounding board.
My blog has been a blessing to me. It has helped me hone my writing skills. It has given my life some routine and structure after I finally settled on blogging every Monday.
It has increasingly given me a platform through which to express my love of country and the degree to which I value democracy. Most of all, it has introduced me to a network of bloggers around the world. My interactions with them have enriched my life more than I can say.
Deep down inside, I still have an interest in things like words, so I will continue to try to set aside my Monday blog posts for something beside the dismantling of the American democracy or at least give an historical context to that current destruction when I blog about an event from our past.
Today, I am reaching back to one of the reasons I started blogging on June 24, 2010. I wanted to blog about my reading and my writing. Gradually, my love of studying history entered the picture.
Today, I will not blog about my concerns for American democracy except for eluding to it in my introductory paragraphs.
I’m curious about how we all speak English in the United States, but we have beautiful regional dialects. This is something that has always intrigued me.
Today I will blog about our Southern accent and dialect and the Southern Appalachian dialect. There is some overlapping of the two, although the Southern Appalachian dialect is often singled out as something unique.
What prompted me to write about this today?
The short answer is the Rebuilding Hollers Foundation.
In my April 7, 2025, blog post, Books I Read in March 2025, & Hurricane Helene Update, I mentioned the Hurricane Helene recovery efforts of Rebuilding Hollers Foundation, based in Bakersville, North Carolina. Their website is https://rebuildinghollers.org/page-18086.
Not wanting to create confusion, I gave a brief explanation of what a “holler” is, as in “hills and hollers.” As a follow up, today I’m blogging about the Southern Appalachian dialect.
You might be tempted to laugh about “hills and hollers,” and that is fine, but this is not a humorous post. I find dialects fascinating!
I lived and worked in Robeson County in the eastern part of North Carolina some 40 years ago when one-third of the county’s population of 100,000 was white, one-third was black, and one-third was Lumbee and Tuscarora Indian. There were interesting words and sayings in common use there that were new to me, even though I’ve lived in the state my entire life.
One example that comes to mind is “bees” as in “She bees comin’ later. And there is a flatness in the Lumbee speech that is the same as I’ve heard from Cherokee Indians. I can hear it on TV, for example, and immediately know the speaker is either from Robeson County or the Qualla Boundary (home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.) The flatness in their voices is counteracted by colorful and interesting sayings and pronunciations.
Pursuing more information about the Southern Appalachian dialect, I found several helpful articles online in the JSTOR Daily website.
“The Legendary Language of the Appalachian ‘Holler’,” by Chi Luu on the JSTOR Daily website goes so far as to state the following: “In fact, some say that the speech of the southern mountaineers is “pure Elizabethan English” just as Shakespeare would have spoken it. Others go even further and claim that ‘the dialect of the Appalachian people is the oldest living English dialect, older than the speech of Shakespeare, closer to the speech of Chaucer,’ apparently preserved by a brutally impoverished rural existence in the isolation of their mountain fastness, with little contact from the modern civilizing ways of outsiders.”
That article was published in 2018, and I find it a bit harsh in its description of the people who live in the southern Appalachians. It makes them sound like that have never had any contact with the outside world.
I’m no linguistics expert, but as a native North Carolinian I tend to think it was that for a couple hundred years few people from the outside moved into those mountains. That made it easy for the local dialect to continue.
The same holds true for parts of coastal North Carolina. The high tider, hoi toider, or hoi toide English dialect is distinct and lovely to hear. My cousin married a man from Morehead City. He often said “hoi toide” for high tide, and I have never been able to say it like he did. But now I have digressed and gone 400 miles east of the southern Appalachians.
Back to the subject at hand and the JSTOR Daily article I cited in the beginning…
I must disagree a bit more with the writer of that article because I have lived in the southern piedmont of North Carolina most of my life and I don’t consider many of the examples in the article to be strictly from southern Appalachia.
Examples in the article include:
Britches (trousers)
Poke (bag)
Sallet (salad)
Afeared (afraid
Fixin’ (getting ready to do something, “I’m fixin to go to town.”)
Allow (suppose, as in “I’ll allow that you’re right.”
Yander (yonder)
Leetle (little)
Spell (as in “I’ll stay for a little spell”
My parents said “britches” and my father’s oldest brother (born in 1899) always called a paper bad a “paper poke.” I don’t hear it as much as I did growing up, but it was not uncommon to hear someone in the southern piedmont to say that they were “fixin” to do something.
And that brings us back to “holler”
Holler (hollow)
Winder (window)
Tater (potato)
Feller (fellow)
Again, I thought those were just southern pronunciations. I’ve probably heard window pronounced “winder,” but the common pronunciation where I live is “winda.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a hollow pronounced “hollow” except in references to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Along those same lines, I’m reminded that my mother had and Aunt Ella, but in my great-grandfather’s daybooks he wrote his daughter’s name “Eller.”
And around here we would never say, “fellow.” We would say “fella.” Same situation as “winda” instead of window.
One of my uncles married a woman from the NC southern Appalachians. She pronounced fellow as feller. I always noticed that because in the southern piedmont we would say “fella.” Remembering the time she said, “A feller’s gotta do what a feller’s gotta do,” still makes me smile. Don’t be surprised if those words show up in a piece of my fiction writing someday. Aunt Mary’s mountain dialect was definitely more distinct than my piedmont dialect, and I found it endearing.
Were the roots in Scotland and Ireland?
It is said that many pronunciations and words can be traced back to Scotland and Ireland. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that on the Kintyre Peninsula of Scotland, it is (or at least at some time was) common to call a bag a poke. That’s where my gggg-grandparents (Morrison) immigrated from, so somehow “poke” got carried down to my uncle. No one else in the family called it that.
Other words in Chi Luu’s article include might could or might should (“We might could go to the ballgame.”) I had a classmate in school who said, “might could.” We grew up less than ten miles apart, but I had never hear “might could” before. Perhaps it was something passed down in his family.
Another oddity pointed out in the JSTOR Dailyarticle is what the writer called “a-prefixing.” An example would be a-runnin’.
And then there is the perfectly good word, “reckon,” as in “I reckon it’ll take an hour to get there.” Chi Luu’s articles said “reckon” is in regular use in Australia and British English, but its use in the Southern Appalachians (and the wider region) is “stigmatized as backwards hillbilly talk. American language attitudes show a marked disrespect and prejudice for marked dialects like Appalachian English.”
One more example attributed to southern Appalachia but not uncommon in the southern piedmont is “like to” or “liketa.” One would say, “I got lost and liketa never found my way out.”
You’ve probably noticed that we Southerners tend to drop the “g” at the end of words. It’s not that we’re lazy. That’s just a part of our speech patterns. The “ah” sound is a softer pronunciation than the “ow” sound.
Like I said, dialects fascinate me, so don’t be surprised if I write about them against sometime. With the advent of television, the southern dialect and pronunciations have eroded. I hear it in my great nieces’ voices. They were all born and raised in Metro Atlanta, but my North Carolina southern accent is much more pronounced than theirs. That makes me sad. I don’t want the southern accent or dialect to die out.
Hurricane Helene Update
As of Friday, 105 roads in North Carolina were still closed due to Hurricane Helene. This count includes seven US highways, 13 state highways, and 85 state roads. Although technically “open” now, I-40 in Haywood County is still open for just one lane in both directions with a 35 mile-per-hour speed limit.
There are still no estimates of when all of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina will reopen.
Until my next blog post
I hope you always have a good book to read.
Remember the people of Ukraine as they continue to beat back a much larger invader; Kentucky because the misery left behind from recent flooding there has completely fallen off the mainline media’s radar; the earthquake victims in Myanmar because they must be shocked that the US isn’t sending aid or aid workers to alleviate their suffering; and western North Carolina (because seven months after Hurricane Helene, the need is still great.)
Janet
Janet's Writing Blog 
I have read in two different articles that North Carolina has more accents than any other state. Mightin could be. 😉
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I’m also fascinated by dialects. Here we have many of them. Sometimes, the differences are so big that people living less than fifty kilometers apart can barely understand each other. Just last week, I said two sentences in the dialect of my childhood, and my husband thought I was speaking Arabic! He’s from a completely different region and mostly speaks standard Dutch.
I grew up speaking dialect — it was the language of home, the streets, the schoolyards. Yet I notice that I’ve already forgotten many words. Sometimes I really have to dig deep to remember them.
I find it fascinating to read that America also has such rich dialects. What touches me most is how strongly they’re tied to a sense of identity and place. Are people in the U.S. also concerned that their dialects might be forgotten? Over here, fewer and fewer people still use dialect actively, especially the younger generation.
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I have not heard that, Pat, but you might could be right. LOL! I love accents, old sayings, and dialects… every bit of it! I love how some Virginians pronounce house, “hoose.” What I don’t like is how people outside the South think Appalachian is pronounced “Appa-lay-chun.” It’s like fingernails on a blackboard! And locally, our area has become a magnet for people from other parts of the country and they insist on changing the pronunciations of our roads and area small towns. Instead of learning how local surnames have been pronounced for centuries, they insist on correcting us. Reminds me of when a friend of mine at Appalachian State University told me I was mispronouncing “Morrison.” She was from New Jersey, so I suppose she knew stuff. LOL! Hmmmm…. I might could write a blog post about this….
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Would be a welcome change from Sir Grift-a- lot.
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That’s interesting about your having various dialects in The Netherlands. I guess I would have naively thought that would not be the case in a country that’s been inhabited for thousands of years. I think of dialects developing in the US because it was settled by people from all over the world over several hundred years. I’m laughing at myself as I type this, as I’m reminded that the same situation exists in Scotland, which has been inhabited for thousands of years. When my sister and I flew to Scotland, we were surrounded by Scots on the plane. We could not understand a word they were saying. We expressed our surprise when friends who lived in Edinburgh but were natives of the Isle of Lewis picked us up at the airport. They said, “They must have been from Glasgow. We can’t understand them either!”
To answer your question, I don’t know if there is widespread concern in the US over the loss of dialects and accents or not. I haven’t heard it discussed, but it concerns me. The fact that my four great-nieces in their early 20s hardly have any Southern accent although they have lived all their lives in Atlanta, Georgia, makes me sad. The Southern accent has always been made fun of by people from other parts of the country, so I think that has resulted in a embarrassment by this younger generation. They probably don’t even realize it, but they are trying to speak like the people they hear on TV. The journalists and broadcasters are trained to speak without any regional accent, so that’s what the children and teens hear on TV and they subconsciously try to talk like that. We are losing part of the richness as a nation. We used to celebrate some of our diversity. I see this only getting worse under the pressures in place by the Trump Administration. “Diversity” itself has become a bad word.
Word usage naturally changes over time, but it now strikes me that by uncle calling a paper bag a paper poke will not be carried down in the family. My aunt always saying, “It’s comin’ up a cloud” when she saw dark clouds forming will not be carried down in the family. My sister and I try to make sure our great-nieces know that our mother often said, “You won’t learn any younger” when we balked at trying something new, and “Stand on your own two feet” to encourage us not to shy away from a difficult or challenging situation.
I would love to know the progression of how my immigrant ancestors from Scotland spoke and how that accent was completely lost from one generation to the next — and all that was lost before the advent of the radio or TV. Fascinating! Perhaps I should have studied dialectology instead of political science in college!
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How striking it is how universal the phenomenon of dialects is. I taught non-native speakers for many years, mostly refugees from all over the world, and they often told me that dialects existed in their home countries as well — sometimes even more than we can imagine. It seems to be something present in all times and places. Unfortunately, that also applies to the disappearance of those dialects.
Here in The Netherlands and Belgium, we’re also experiencing another trend: our language is becoming increasingly anglicized. More and more new words are borrowed from English. You especially see it in the world of technology: terms like backup, delete, upload — often there’s no real Dutch equivalent, or it just sounds unnatural. There’s quite a bit of debate about this. Some people argue that we should remain faithful to Dutch and use native words wherever possible, but that’s not always easy.
Don’t get me wrong: I find English a truly beautiful language. But it shouldn’t be the case that we allow it to push our own language aside. Language is so much more than just communication — it’s also culture, identity, and history.
Now I realize I’ve strayed a bit from the topic of dialects, and for that I apologize. But in a way, this issue touches me in the same way: in both cases we’re watching valuable forms of language — whether dialects or native tongues — come under pressure and risk disappearing.
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Yes, it really is striking how this appears to be happening worldwide. Your comment about English words like backup, delete, and upload being worked into the language in The Netherlands and Belgium reminds me once again of our friends in Scotland. They were born and raised on the Isle of Lewis, so they were native Gaelic speakers. They only learned English when they started school. Visiting them in their home was a special treat for us and we enjoyed conversations with them about religion, politics, and everything in between. In conversation they would occasionally become a bit frustrated as there was something they wanted to say but they couldn’t find the words they wanted. They told us that there were words in Gaelic that had no English translation. They bemoaned the fact that their two sons had grown up with no appreciation for their parents’ native tongue. Mary said when her sons found her listening to a Gaelic radio program they would tease her for listening to “that Chinese stuff.”
It seems like we never learn from the mistakes made in history. The way in which the US Government forced indigenous children into boarding schools and literally put bars of soap in their mouths if they slipped up and spoke a word of their native language. They literally beat the native languages out of those children, but then the US Government was happy to use native Cherokee speakers and native Navajo speakers during World Wars I and II to convey military messages that the enemy could not understand. We’ll never know the true benefit of the “Navajo Code Talkers” in the Allies’ victory in World War II. Here in North Carolina, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians are once again teaching the Cherokee language in their schools, but they were almost too late in doing so. The language was dying out.
Along those same lines… I watched a documentary on TV this weekend about the Vietnam War. It included a video clip of an American soldier who was held in a POW prison in North Vietnam. He was forced to make an anti-American statement, but as he was talking he was able to blink his eyes in Morse Code to explain that he was under duress. That was in the 1960s. When the US military stopped using the Morse Code a couple of decades later (I’m not certain of the date), I remember thinking that was a bad decision. This generation wrongly thinks computer communication is going to save us.
I’ve enjoyed our conversation, Matroos. I have learned so much from you. And may I say, I marvel that you write in perfect English. We Americans are so spoiled by speaking English.
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Loved it! I have always been intrigued by the way people speak the language of their land. We’ve many dialects (as well as five official languages) here in Spain. I lived in Florida but learned English from a Scottish tutor so in Miami they did not understand me. I learned American English by the by but still write the British/European way and still use different words. I reckon is a phrase I have always used and it’s understood but one Florida/Southern expression I could never repeat was “y’all”. Take good care Janet! I really enjoyed and learned much from this post.
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I’ve always been fascinated by regional accents, so I greatly enjoyed this point. Vermont Public Radio did a show a while back on how the Vermont accent is disappearing. If you listen to the first three and a half minutes or so, you’ll hear the “oi” sound. (It’s a way of loif.) I don’t know if the Vermont oi is the same as the one you discussed. In any event, a very enjoyable discussion!
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Oops, here’s the link. https://www.vermontpublic.org/programs/2016-08-05/cow-or-ke-ow-the-past-present-and-future-of-the-vermont-accent
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The Uk also has many dialects and they fascinate me too..Janet …I hope you have a lovely week x
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Fantastic! So glad you enjoyed it, Francis. I had to laugh about your Scottish accent… and you inability to say “y’all.” It just naturally rolls off my tongue. Glad to know that you use “I reckon.” All good stuff! I wish I knew more about dialects and how they develop.
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I’m glad you enjoyed this post, Liz. That’s interesting about the “oi” sound in Vermont. I wonder if there’s a long ago connection between it and the “oi” along part of coastal North Carolina. That would make a good thesis for a university student!
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Thank you, Carol. When my sister and I visited Scotland back in the 1990s, we quickly learned that the people in Glasgow have a very distinct dialect. Our friends in Edinburgh said they couldn’t understand them either, so for us not to worry about it. Fun stuff! I hope you have a lovely week, too.
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I’m just getting to this and it’s coming up on midnight. I listened to the first 3-4 minutes several times, trying to hear exactly what “Fred” was saying. The “loif” didn’t ring a bell, but I’ll listen to it again tomorrow when I have time. The word that struck me, though, was “by.” It sounded exactly like my cousin’s husband from Morehead City, NC said it. That always stuck with me because most North Carolinians pronounce words like “by” with a soft i sound and definitely not a long i sound like Vermont’s Fred and Morehead City’s Sam said it. Thank you so much for giving me the link to that radio program. I look forward to listening to the entire program.
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Here in Spain you always know where someone is from according to their accent and the words they use. It’s an interesting topic for sure. Have a wonderful day Janet and all the best.
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Yes, it would!
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I look forward to hearing what you think!
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It certainly adds to the richness of life. It would be boring if we all spoke the same language or even within a language used the same dialect. Have a great day, Francis.
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Trying to get my weekly newsletter out this morning and an appointment in the afternoon, but I look forward to listening to it as soon as I can. Thanks again for giving me the link.
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You’re welcome, Janet!
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So true Janet! All the best and a grand day to you.
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When we moved to western NC from. FLorida, it was like learning another language. Chat for gravel, gaum for a messy situation , I wouldn’t care to meaning I wouldn’t mind. I.love the accent and the idioms and after fifty years. I’m right fluent
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The only ones that strike me as Scottish are poke and leetle. Feller, winder, etc., are words I’d expect to see in Dickens when he’s doing his street urchin language, so I don’t know if that means that originated in London – of course, it may simply be coincidence. I must say a lot of this dialect is very much what I’d think of as distinctively American – especially reckon and liketa, fixin’ and the a-prefix. If I was being rude enough to impersonate an American, those are the words I’d throw in to make up for my inability to do accents! Perhaps some American character used that dialect in a TV programme when I was young and impressionable.
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Doctor’s appointment, two grocery stores, a 90-minute webinar tonight, and trying to get tomorrow morning’s blog finished… hmmmm, I’m afraid I’ll have to listen to the Vermont accents program another day. I’m sure you understand.
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I love that, Vicki! I reckon you are right fluent by now You’ve mentioned some words I haven’t heard, but my four years of living in the mountains were living in a college dorm in Boone. That’s quite different from being out among the people. I was mainly introduced to the local vernacular via the radio station in Boone. It was a different world. I grew up in the country in Cabarrus County, but we had radio and TV from nearby Charlotte. It was culture shock to be dependent on WATA in Boone for news and music. Every morning would begin with “Obituaries of the Air Waves.” Funeral music played in the background while the announcer read obituaries. Since it was sponsored by the local funeral home and they had paid for the time, we had to listen to five or ten minutes of funeral music even if there were no obituaries to be announced! That was followed by “Swap and Shop”, and we got to hear people from all over Watauga County call in and talk about something they wanted to sell or buy. And now… I wouldn’t give anything for the experience.
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I appreciate your perspective on those words. You have, no doubt, heard some of those words like feller and winder on an American TV show or movie. Hollywood has always delighted in making fun of accents — especially the general Southern accent. Back in the 1950s and 1960s when “Westerns” were popular on TV, there were always one or two characters who spoke with such accents that it was difficult to know what they were saying. Of course, they were usually the poor, uneducated, ne’er do well types. Since you’re from Scotland, I want to ask you about something one of my father’s sisters would say and now one of my cousins says it. My sister and I always found it sort of quaint, but when we visited the Kintyre Peninsula where our Morrisons came from, we found out that it something that at least in the past was said there. I don’t know what to call it. It isn’t exactly a saying. It’s a phrase that is added at the end of a sentence sort of like a confirmation. Examples: She went to town, so she did. He made that table, so he did. It rained last night, so it did. Perhaps it is just something in Kintyre, but I’m curious to know if you’ve ever hear it. By the way, my cousin who says it is a great-niece of our aunt who said it. Interesting how it not only skipped a generation but jumped to another direct line in the family. Since our Morrisons left Scotland in the 1760s, it amazed my sister and me that “poke” and “so it is/so she/he did” surfaced again 200 years later.
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Yes, I understand! It’s the same for me.
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Oh, yes! That’s a very Scottish expression and still widely used. I think it may be a West of Scotland thing more than the East – the West often has influences from Irish speech patterns because there’s been such a transfer of population in both directions for centuries. As you say, it’s a confirmation, used to boast – a mother might say about a daughter “She came top in English, so she did!” – or to emphasise the truth of something rather unbelievable, like scandal – “Have you heard about her next door? Ran off with the vicar, so she did!” “She never did!” “Aye, I’m telling you, she did so!” How interesting that it has travelled across the Atlantic!
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I’m thrilled to know this! You have no idea! I’ve never heard anyone else use the expression other than the one aunt and now my first cousin’s daughter. I love to know that it is truly a Scottish expression and that it is still very much in use! I can’t wait to tell my sister! This is wonderful! So now you can imagine in your head people with Southern American accents saying this very Scottish expression. How funny is that? Thank you for your insight and examples.
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Terrific post Janet… when we lived in Texas in the 1980s at first we were very confused by the different accents but over the two years we were there we began to recognise where they originated and our friends would often quiz us when a newcomer joined the group. We have quite a variation in Ireland for such a small country and they can vary from county to county despite being next to each other and to be honest it is the same in the UK. I would be sorry to see yet another unique identifier disappear as it adds such a wonderful element to our humanity. ♥
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Thank you for reading my blog post and taking the time to leave a comment. You are a busy person, so I appreciate it. I have a growing appreciation for dialects and accents. They enrich our lives so much. Life would certainly be boring if we all spoke the same language in exactly the same way.
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It’s interesting that some of the words you described are also part of the Vermont dialect as Liz, above, mentioned, it is fast disappearing. ‘Winder’ ‘britches’ ‘taters’ etc. and definitely that ‘oi’ sound and the absence of many consonants, including the ‘t’ on our own state of Vermont!
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Thank you for dropping by and taking the time to leave a comment, Dorothy. Liz and I had an interesting exchange about this. What strikes me from your comment is that Vermonters don’t pronounce the “t” at the end of Vermont? I had no idea! And here I’ve been pronouncing that “t” all my life. LOL! I spent a couple of wonderful summer days in Vermont many years ago. I always wanted to go back in the fall, but I never got to do that.
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It’s beautiful then! Hope you can make it!
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Thank you. Maybe I can.
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Accents are so fascinating and it is a shame for any local accents and words to be lost. Most bloggers are only known by the written word. I wonder how surprised we would be to hear each other’s accents?
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That’s a good point, Janet. I wonder if we could even understand each other in person! I gather from your website that you live in the UK. Thank you for dropping by my blog and for leaving a comment.
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Thanks Janet. I was born in London, have lived in Australia, worked at Heathrow, now live on the south coast and tend to think I don’t have an accent. I understand English speakers from lots of countries better than from some parts of Britain!
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I’m having internet problems today due to a cable being ripped up nearby. I’ll try again to send you a reply. My first try didn’t seem to go. I imagine you’ve heard a multitude of accents! When my sister and I visited Scotland, we were constantly having to try to understand the various accents. I never did understand the Glaswegians. My sister had to translate for me!
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My husband was Scottish, from the borders and the first time he took me home I couldn’t understand half of what they said! Glaswegians are the hardest I’m sure and though Edinburgh is only forty five miles away their accent is very refined and different.
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