Life with my Appalachian Accent

one of the most easily recognized attributes of being from appalachia is the accent now you can already hear i have a strong mountain accent people from different parts of appalachia actually have slightly different accents if you're not familiar with them you may think everyone from appalachia sounds the same but there's just variations depending on what area that you're from but i think accents no matter where they're from or no matter the kind even if they're not from appalachia i just think they're beautiful i'm fascinated by them i love to listen to people that have accents in today's modern world it seems like people with accents are looked down on whether you're from appalachia or a different area of the united states that has a strong accent but i think they're just amazing that those um the sounds the way that you say the words and the words that you actually use how that's been passed down from generation to generation in those areas and it just continues to to people easily recognize hey that's a girl from the south or from appalachia or from new york or from wherever but the only accent that i have first-hand knowledge of is my own my appalachian accent and i've never really felt bad about my accent one good reason or the main reason is probably that i've never lived anywhere but appalachia so i so everywhere i've lived even when i moved away as a young adult i was still in appalachia so there was always somebody there that sounded like me so i didn't have to it wasn't like i stood out so maybe that's why i've never felt bad about it but when i hear someone with an appalachian accent if i'm away maybe i'm at the beach or somewhere and i'm in a grocery store or something and a few aisles away i hear the faint sounds of someone that sounds like me it just makes me feel at home and the reason it does is because that's the accent that i'm most familiar with i used to work at a college i worked there for many years in the first part of my employment i was the college receptionist so that meant i handled the switchboard i directed phone calls and i also greeted everyone that came in the main administrative building well one day this gentleman come in wearing overalls older guy and he nodded at me and then he asked told me what he was looking for and i showed him where to go well about 20 or 30 minutes later he come back out and he stopped at my desk and i said did you find everything you needed and he said oh yeah they were real nice they helped me i got it all took care of and i said well good and he kind of leaned close to me and he said you're one of us ain't you who's your people well what did he mean by that he wasn't saying anything bad about the other people that worked at the college some of them were native to the area too it's just that he heard something in my accent that made him feel comfortable enough to ask me who i who i belong to who my people were when appalachia the family and the your family ties and community that whole time of surrounding the community is so strong that it's like we all have this map in our mind and we want to know where each person that we meet fits into that so that's why you people often say who do you belong to they're just trying to fit you in that map in their mind of the community what's often happens when somebody around here asked me who i belong to and i tell them he knew pap so when i told him whose daughter i was so we had an immediate connection there a friend of mine who grew up in arizona she told me this sweet story about an accent the power of having an accent so she grew up in arizona and her family life wasn't the best her mother and father had a lot of troubles and a lot of problems and she was fairly young when they finally divorced and just a few years later her father passed away he died so fast forward to when she was in college so she was in college and her college took a trip to kentucky so she was in kentucky with her college students from back in arizona and they were lost and she said they you know this is way before cell phones and uh gps were common and things like that so they were lost and she said they seen a gentleman on the side of the road and she said well if you stop i'll ask him where we're at and ask him you know if he can give us directions so they did and she asked him and she said i just i almost passed out when that man's mouth opened and he started telling us where to go my daddy's voice come out of his mouth i couldn't believe it i just was you know spellbound by the way he talked i had not heard anyone speak like that since my daddy passed away well she didn't know it because she was young when her parents divorced and still fairly young when her dad passed away that he was from appalachia so she had never really questioned why if he sounded different or anything that was just the way her daddy talked but then when she heard that man standing you know on the side of the road in kentucky she realized oh my daddy he sounded just like this and then when she got older and she investigated he was definitely from appalachia and he'd retained his accent all those years to so that then impressed upon her that that's what her father sounded like when the girls were in eighth grade their school trip was a trip to the outer banks of north carolina and i went with them and we had a great time but we had a really interesting thing happen about our accents so we were actually still in wilmington and we were going to go across and i'm sorry i can't remember the names of the sounds and all that kind of stuff but we were going to go to see the wild ponies of north carolina i'm sure that you've probably heard about them so it was a really windy windy day in fact it was so windy they had like warnings out for ocean and on our trip you just had to go out the boat went over a portion of ocean and then it went back into the sound so anyway we were on this boat and we went over the open ocean we had to all go inside nobody could be outside on the deck it was kind of scary for people like us who weren't familiar with things like that but then once we got back into the sound the calmer waters everyone could go back outside so it was cool it was a march so it was early and then that wind so it was a cool time and me and the girls went around to one side of the boat where there was a bench that went the whole length of it and we sat there and so the sunshine could hit us we were just sitting there talking and you know watching and being amazed by everything we saw well i noticed one of the crew members he was working nearby us and he kept staring at us well every once in a while i'd hear him say something to some another crew member and i thought you know i kept thinking he sounded kind of funny and you know i don't know and finally i looked over i whispered to the girls i said i think that man is making fun of the way we talk and so of course we didn't you know we weren't going to confront him or anything so we didn't we just kept talking to each other about what we were you know whatever we were talking about when a little while he come over to us approached us and he said do you think i sound funny and i said no i think i thought you thought we sounded funny and that you were trying to sound like us like you were making fun of us and he started laughing he said i thought you were making fun of me well then he said where are you from and i said well we're from as far west as you can go and still be in north carolina we're from brasstown and so i said where are you from and he said well i'm from ocracoke island that's where i grew up my my family's been there for generations and this is the way we sound and i said well the way i sound where we sound is how people in the mountains of north carolina sound anyway we got so we didn't sound that similar but it really did it was similar enough to where i thought he was trying to make fun of us like over exaggerate and he thought we were trying to make fun of him anyway when we settled that neither of us was trying to make fun of the other we had the biggest laugh over that and it was really a funny you know example of what can happen with your accent there's a lot of stereotypes about the appalachian accent or the southern accent you know people that have an accent like that are thought to be less educated which of course is not true i've been writing about appalachia for over 10 years on the blog blind pig and the acorn my name is tipper presley if you've never read my blog or never seen any of my videos and that's the subject that's often come up but recently someone told me a gentleman over in blairsville told me this little incident that happened several years ago pap died in 2016 so it was probably a couple of years before that so anyway we were my family's musical so we were playing music doing a performance in blairsville georgia which is not very far from here and this gentleman was part of the sound crew so he was in you know handling the sound and he said he noticed some people in the audience you know because he was really close to him that my pap that he was talking and when he was talking whatever he was saying to the audience he used the word guns he said younes and he said they kind of snickered at each other and hit each other you know pointed like look at this old man he can't even speak right or whatever so he said he just kind of paid attention to him throughout the rest of the the concert and then a little bit later somebody i don't know if somebody asked or pointed it out that pap was wearing a hat that was you know had a big y on it it was a yell hat and i guess somebody i don't know how that come up but in it pap said oh well the reason i wear this is because two of my grandsons went to yale on full ride scholarship so he said he noticed he looked over at the people that had been making fun of him and then he'd seen him kind of look sheepishly like maybe we shouldn't have been making fun of him you know wow his grandsons went to yale they must really be something which you know is not bad from for two boys who grew up in a hauler in appalachia but anyway that was an you know an example of what can happen sometimes with those kind of stereotypes i've never had anyone make fun of how i talk unless it's behind my back and i don't know about it the only people that make fun of how i talk is my husband and my children because i sometimes say words that are not words according to them but anyway those are the only people that i know about but when my oldest nephew one of those yell boys went off to college the first time he had never been anywhere you know that far for that length of time by himself you know out in the big world and so we were all worried about him but i remember it probably christmas was because you can't come home every semester or every weekend from you know that distance so it's probably christmas that year before he first got to come home and when he did of course we all enjoyed it and then we hated for him to leave and granny was really worrying about him and you know telling him she didn't know if if those people up there would be good to him and you know she just wanted him close to where she could watch him and make sure he's all right and all this he said oh granny don't worry about me they all like me because they like to hear me talk so see there is people that love just like i do they love all these various accents and so there's some people that really enjoy hearing your appalachian or southern accent another example of that is here in our community we have a friend who every year she has kind of a get together for women and in the community and we just eat and have a have a good time and fellowship one with another and probably it's probably been two years ago when we we went in and she's been doing this for years so it's you know we're it's usually all the same people kind of maybe one or two new ones but not really it's usually kind of the same circle of women and girls so about two years ago me and corey and katie went and right when we come in the door i just happened to notice this lady that i'd never seen before well she was beautiful that was one of the reasons she had just long flowing hair and just a beautiful smile she was just lovely and so everyone started welcome welcoming us in you know hey how are you take your coat off all that and so we were talking to them and and i noticed she just kept staring at us and and really you know intently and i thought maybe she thinks she knows us or i don't know and so then i kind of started talking you know conversation with one of my friends and i kind of kept my eye on that lady and she just kept staring at us and and i could see she was making a beeline for us she was going to get over there where we were at no matter what well just in a few minutes she was just standing right beside me just you know smiling at me and i stopped talking and i turned around and looked at her and smiled and she said your voice your voice is beautiful so it turns out she was visiting from finland and she said i've been here a month and i've heard no one that speaks like you where are you from you know and i said well we're from here you know there are other people that sound like us but maybe you've just not been around them but she said your voice is the most beautiful thing i've ever heard and she said i'm going to stand by you all night just so that i can hear you talk and i said well okay you know that's real flattering but so she was just amazed and and was just thrilled over our accent so sometimes you know people do it's not all bad it's what i'm saying it's not all stereotypes and of course those stereotypes are just that they're not true just because you use have an accent or use colorful words and phrases and and things doesn't mean that you're any less educated than anybody else there's so many aspects of appalachian language that we could talk about it forever i have a monthly appalachian vocabulary test on my blog blind picking the acorn for those of you who are not readers who've never seen it before i also write about language a lot i'm really passionate about it's just one of my favorite things those words that have happened phrases that have held on because they've been passed down through generations in the same family and i'm still saying words that my great great grandfather said and of course um i think i said before if i didn't languages ever is fluid and it's ever evolving so there's a lot of words that they said that we do we don't say anymore that have fallen out of fashion even from when i was a kid there's words that are no longer said because they don't make sense anymore uh one of the sayings that i always think of is when i was little it was so common to hear somebody say flick your bick because that was a commercial for the big uh lighter you know well today my children they would not even know what that meant because they weren't familiar with the commercial and with the lighter so a lot of times it's societal kind of things that makes language fall out of fashion but some of the most obvious little things about appalachian language is that sometimes we add extra letters to the words that don't belong there so ones that come to mind are like once we put a t once twice the same thing put a t twice across across i listened for those t's to people and sometimes people that don't really sound appalachian i'll hear that t and i think you had somebody somewhere that taught you to say it with a t you know some some influence there but then with other words uh well a few more uh that add letters so wash turns into wash that are rinse like rinse the dishes is rinse rinse the dishes and then but some words we take letters off of so we don't like sitting well all those ing words we leave the g off sitting fighting those kind of things potato becomes tater mater is for tomato so there but there's i mean there's just all kinds of little grammatic things like that but then there's tons of colorful words and and unique sayings that we could go on and on about maybe we could do a whole video about saiyans i hope so that would be really neat but a few of the unusual words that come to mind is midland midland means bacon leather bridges i just did a video about leather bridges so that's just dried green beans you'll have to go watch that if you haven't picked it means you look sick or you look pale if you're picking today a dodger is a piece of bread so if you'd like a dodger to eat and did you ever scrooch anyone scrooch means uh hug up tight so maybe you're you know you hug with your sweetheart that's scrooching but it's also like screwed like i would say the girl scrooch over i want to sit with you i want to sit on the couch make room for me really is what i'm saying they're psy goggling anti goggling and cattywampus that all kind of mean crooked like if something's on the that pictures uh anti-goggling or side goggling on the wall you need to straighten it up those are some those are i rarely hear those today though but those are just who couldn't like those words uh arsh means irish that's just a corruption of the word irish but i grew up with that one with pap and granny saying arse potato do you want to arch tater for supper or sweet potato or sweet tater so our that's that's probably one of my favorites i don't know why probably just because i can hear granny and pat both in my head saying it another one is gone so to make a gum you make a mess a lot of times it said with mess your granny would tell the girls when they were little they loved to go in the bathroom and really they turned the water on but i'm not sure they actually watered used any soap to wash their hands when they were supposed to be and they're scrubbing up for dinner they'd just be in there making a mess but she'd tell them don't be in there garment and mess and i'll have to clean that up you know should get onto them and tell them that but sometimes the appalachian language is hard to understand for people that are not from here one of the ones that's often wrote about if you do a quick google you probably find it is i don't care to so for example um i don't care to in a sentence for me would be like if granny said could you would you're in town next week would you pick this up for me if you go by there and get my prescription or something i'd say no i don't care too i will well what i mean is that won't bother me a bit i don't mind a bit i'll go get it but to other people it sounds like well i don't care to i'm not going to do it so a funny story about that one of the first bosses i ever had years ago when i was just a teenager she said when she first moved to this area she wanted to make friends with her neighbors you know of course and and she said she's seen one of her neighbor ladies at the little general store there and fires creek and um she said would you like to go into town and get something to eat we could go eat and she said the lady said i don't i don't care too yeah well doris thought she meant i don't care too i'm not interested so she just drove off and left her standing there which later they laughed about it you know but that was one of the things she had to learn no we mean i don't care to like sure i don't mind it won't put me out but we say i don't care to which does sound weird when you think about it uh another funny one like that is uh one of my fellow staff members when she first moved here she said that she told me so when i first moved here one of the things that threw me that i never understood is so that if i was talking and then somebody didn't hear me and they said do what and she said i just couldn't understand what they wanted me to do which is that's real common if i hear you say something i don't understand it i'm going to say do what to try to get you to say it again and she said i was just left thinking what what am i supposed to do what do they think i need to do you know she just didn't get it until she finally she'd been here long enough she figured out what they meant but that's an uh an interesting one one that on the blind pig and the acorn one time that i confused people with years ago i was writing about something and i said pap swarped the car into the briars to teach steve a lesson my older brother and people was like what do you mean he swarped the car that doesn't make any sense well first i thought well he swapped the car that's what i mean but then i had to think about it like okay now i have to tell exactly what he did so pap was driving down the road and he drove out into like made a curve that really wasn't there kind of drove to the edge of the road or even out of the road a little bit so that his car was closer to the briars and steve was leaning his hands out with his arms and hands out and pat swarped him into the briar so the briars you know hit steve sounds kind of mean but it really wasn't and and in those days that was the days when uh no seat belts kids didn't wear seat belts we stood up in the back seat all the time you know and all the windows were always down because our cars never had air conditioning so steve was leaning way out and pap had told him and told him to quit doing that and he wouldn't quit so that was pat's way of kind of teaching him look this is not only can you get you know briars up and down your arms you may fall out you better stop anyway but pap swarps the car of course you can swap somebody with a rope or a hickory or something like that that's another use for swarp but um anyway that was one that confused people over the years i've had people tell me well that's not just appalachian i hear that word where i live too and they're right those people are right language is fluid it moves and it changes and we live in one area and we take it with us to that area our grandparents or our parents do the same and and that's how language continues is that we pass it down through those generations even if that generation moved to a different part of the country so those people are all right these things appalachia doesn't have a um a lock box or something where we lock in all these unique words they move around with people and and so you will hear some of these words in area other areas i think they just are more common in appalachia because of our isolated nature um of people you know and of course today we're not as isolated you can i can in two hours i could get on a plane and go anywhere i wanted to go but still the sense of place that most appalachians have causes them to stay in that same general area for my family the wilsons have been in western north carolina for nine generations that's a lot of wilson's that's a lot of people living in that same general area passing down those same traditions those same words so that's why sometimes the accents and the usage of the words why they hold on and why they're connected or people think of appalachia or the south when they hear them that's just what that is but they do exist in other places i totally agree with people that say that and one of my favorite examples of that is an old saying when i first met my husband years ago we've been married 26 years it's a long time ago his mother i noticed that when she would serve supper she would say grab and growl well i thought ain't that cute you know she probably grew up with her family saying it or whatever you know i just didn't give it much thought but i knew miss cindy always said grab and growl well at some point i i was looking in one of my appalachian books or researching and i found grab and growl it was a saying i thought oh my gosh other people said it it wasn't just miss cindy's family other people enough people said it that it was actually documented as a phrase grab and growl before you served uh you know breakfast dinner or supper anyway so i wrote about it on the blind pig and acorn it's been many years back and uh but several years after i had written about it i got an email from a gentleman who lived in the pacific northwest and he said that his wife had said grab and growl they've been married you know 30 40 years whatever and she'd been saying that his whole their whole marriage and he'd always teased her about it and she'd she told him she said i'm not the only person that says it there's other people that say it and and her grandmother said it well he said today our grown daughter come over to eat with us and as usual my wife said grab and growl and as usual we teased her about it and again she said other people say it i'm not the only one and he thought i'll find out he said so i did a quick google and what did i find but your website talking about the exact saying that she's been saying for the last you know 40 years of our marriage so and he said then he said it makes sense you're talking about appalachia her grandparents were from appalachia and then they relocated to the you know pacific northwest and that's where her parents were raised and then where she was raised or one of her parents whichever one anyway so there's an example and i hope that ladies and that gentleman i hope their kids continue to say that you know what a piece of their heritage that's passed down through those generations even though their fam her family you know teased her about it she just kept saying it grab and growl i think that's the best story but that's why like language is so fascinating to me i hope you enjoyed this video about appalachian language you can probably tell it's one of my favorite things to talk about hopefully we can do more videos in the future and i hope you'll subscribe to my channel share this video with your friends and neighbors and mostly i just hope you'll drop back by often as i celebrate appalachia

Channel: Celebrating Appalachia

Views: 121,264

Rating: 4.9715195 out of 5

Keywords: thick Appalachian accent, Appalachian accent, how to do an Appalachian accent, Appalachian Dialect quiz, Appalachian Mountain Talk, Appalachian phrases, Appalachian mountains, Appalachian Dictionary, Southern Accent, NC Accent, Mountain Accent, Appalachian words, Appalachian vocabulary test, unusual words from Appalachia, Southern Appalachian Accent, Southern Appalachian Mountains, Southern accent test, Southern Sayings, Appalachian sayins, funny Appalachian sayings

Id: TTBC2UKRw5U

Length: 23min 37sec (1417 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/xis10al]

I always think it's hilarious when watching television shows or movies that subtitle Appalachian-speak that I can understand very clearly. I often wonder just how many people have trouble understanding me now that I've moved out of the mountains. I know automated systems can't understand me at all, which is always frustrating.

[u/SadAuthor5]

I have the same accent. I have lived all over the country. I’ve never felt bad about the way I talk. The people who’ve made fun of me for it have all been idiots anyway.

[u/wfp2a]

She writes a great blog called Bling Pig & the Acorn. Her daughters are talented Appalachian musicians too

[u/diuguide]

From the piedmont, lived in boone for six years, the accents fascinated me, 20 minutes down the road ppl sounded different...subtle differences but noticeable. It’s the I’s and the y’s that sound deeeefryyyynt

[u/rAxxt]

This is weird, but this woman looks very very familiar to me...is she famous?

[u/roseyelephant33]

P.s. not my video & I don’t live in Appalachia but my parents are from there & whole family grew up there (generations & generations). I visit as much as I can. You all rock.🤟🏻

[u/Poet_Happy]

A few years back they wer er kidnapped and murdered in Tennessee. One died in prison. The other was let out to kill someone else