![]() Then you’ve got your Beverly Hillbillies and Karl from Sling Blade and Cletus Spunkler from The Simpsons and Forest Gump and you see where this all went.įrom the Outer Banks to the mountains, North Carolinians are lucky to know so much about the history of our dialects thanks to sociolinguist Walk Wolfram. Authors created fictional illiterate characters whose broken grammar set the foundation for the negative stereotype of Appalachian residents that still exists today. My parents and grandparents all have stronger southern accents and dialects than I do, and their parents had stronger accents than them, and I realized at some point we’d all been pushed to smooth the kinks out of our voices.Īccording to folks who study such things, the stigma of sounding like a hillbilly began in the late 19th century after the U.S. ![]() But I sure as hell grew up around this kind of language. Honestly, my accent’s never been strong, and, honestly, most of my family doesn’t speak this way. The old-timers would add T’s to the end of words that clearly didn’t end in t and placed A’s where I’s obviously went: “You heared me: I said git arosst that yard with the mower… or do I need to laht a fahr under your arse? I ain’t gonna tell you twicet.”Īnd we all knowed they wasn’t gonna tell us twicet. Where in the actual hell did that R come from? Then there was the perplexing issue of the missing letters in the “veg’ables” that same Maw-Maw would cook for us at dinner, or what I was supposed to do when I was told (before church, of course) that the seam in my stockings was sigogglin. As a kid I played in the woods all day, picked up crawdads (maybe y’all call this critter a crawfish out West), ate collard greens and black-eyed peas for good luck on New Year’s Day and stood bemused every time my neighbor’s grandmother asked me and my playmate to “warsh” the dishes. I’m from Western North Carolina, from a town in the foothills nestled up against the Appalachian (Appa-LATCH-un, the way I say it, but more on that later) Mountains.
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