#appalachian dialect

my initial thoughts about old gods of appalachia

i think it's really smart in what it relays as "appalachian horror," because this is actually what The Appalachian Gothic is supposed to give

what i mean is it's not just like the usual spoopy mythical forest/"don't investigate the noises in the woods" stuff alone. dgmw, obviously i love the urban legends

but the gothic of an area or time period needs cultural elements tied in to really make it chilling, and this does it well. it stands out in the way that it incorporates the genuine horrors of humanity in appalachia with the supernatural element everyone is drawn to about these mountains. it's very creatively done

like in the barlo, kentucky saga i am currently listening to, it's the dangerous coal mines and the near-possessed preacher turning all hellfire n brimstone at the behest of the haints. it preys (i use this word positively here) on this mix of very specific but common fears, both existential and otherwise, held by residents of the appalachian south. love it

as an aside, i love the narrator's accent because it sounds like mine :') a lifetime of code switching means mine isn't quite as strong unfortunately, but our pronunciation habits and colloquialisms are next to identical, so there manages to be this like warm and nostalgic feeling to it, too

because it's honestly so nice to hear my accent and my family's accent as a critical part of a superb story being told, and not just as a vehicle for mockery and stereotypes :')))

now i go to a school, FAR from appalachia. they made fun of the twang in my voice, so you know what i did? i made it worse. i made my accent pluckier than a banjo string and i brag about my culture as if it's something so complex that they'd never understand it. if someone insinuates that i'm stupid for saying "down yonder" or "si gogglin," i'll flip it on them. how do you change a tire? name at least 5 tools that mechanics use. describe me the anatomy of a sink. what's the difference between a nut and a screw?

i'm way better at hands on stuff, just because i unapologetically embraced my culture. the twang in my voice feels more natural than the accent i put on to hide myself back then. my mind is more sound when i let my home flow through me, no matter what people think of it

hell yeah i love me some sociolinguistic stuff and definitely don't know my shit enough to contribute meaningfully to the topic myself SO as asked, if anyone has any insight/interesting sources they want to share, please please do

i have gotten this question/seen it wondered about more than a few times and i've only ever given a short, simplified answer so i thought i'd briefly touch on some specifics about what it is and what it's like to live up a holler

a holler is simply a mountain hollow. it is a narrow area between two mountains, similar to a valley but smaller. much smaller. not all mountain hollows everywhere are rural, but the hollers in the appalachian mountains almost exclusively are.

so in terms of the appalachian holler specifically:

"holler" is the just the pronunciation of the word "hollow" according to the appalachian english dialect.

a holler has a few other defining physical features: a creek, a "mouth" where the creek meets a bigger body of water, and a "head."

the head is pretty much as far back as you can travel up a holler before you run out of places to go. roads ("road" singular is more accurate most times) go up one way; whereas you could, for visualization's sake, imagine a valley as somethin of a set of parallel lines with an entry and exit point on either side, there is essentially only one way up a holler.

as you can imagine, a tiny little one-way holler with no exit sign is pretty secluded. usually hollers were settled by families generations ago and they kept that land in the family.

historically, people up a holler kept to themselves, and they relied heavily on each other, which is where a lot of the "self-sufficient mountain folk" thing comes from. tight knit communities with an "us vs. them" sorta mentality to varying degrees. very impoverished areas.

of course, the hollers remain stolen land belonging the indigenous peoples who lived here before we forced them out. a lot of these modern generations of those settler families are disappearing from them now too due to having to sell land for various reasons over the years. so not every single holler is exclusively occupied by generations of the same community, but living up a holler does still mean you're gonna be a lot more secluded from the rest of the ridge.

yes, i definitely think its wrong to continue using that word. words and their meanings shift, and that word has definitely taken on a meaning that is inextricable from its racist roots. especially because it is still used as a slur.

i think, as appalachians, that is a part of the self-work we have to do--disentangling from ourselves the negative aspects of our culture (including manners of speech) that are inherently harmful, including casual racism, while retaining the positives.

what i mean is: you should absolutely keep your dialectal vocabulary for other, innocuous words n phrases, but not for the ones that actively harm others, like this one.

we shouldn't want to hold onto that word. yes, there was a point for almost all of us, learning and repeating harmful shit when we didn't know better as kids. and then, there is now, when we do. it's our job to recognize these aspects and get rid of them. our sense of familiarity for lack of a better word is not as important as the safety and the comfort of vulnerable populations targeted by such language.

thanks for the question and for doing the work to think about these parts of yourself, i know from experience it can be very uncomfortable. but, again, our comfort is not more important than those oppressed by such language.