Backcountry Speech Ways: Border Origins of Southern Highland Speech

In the United States, a distinctive family of regional dialects can still be heard throughout the Appalachian and Ozark mountains, the lower Mississippi Valley, Texas and the Southern Plains. It is commonly called southern highland or southern midland speech.¹

This American speech way is at least two centuries old. It was recognized in the colonies even before the War of Independence, and identified at first in ethnic rather than regional terms, as “Scotch-Irish speech.” In the backcountry, it rapidly became so dominant that other ethnic stocks in this region adopted it as their own. As early as 1772, a newspaper advertisement reported a runaway African slave named Jack who was said to “speak the Scotch-Irish dialect.”²

The earliest recorded examples of this “Scotch-Irish” speech were strikingly similar to the language that is spoken today in the southern highlands, and has become familiar throughout the western world as the English of country western singers, transcontinental truckdrivers, cinematic cowboys, and backcountry politicians.

This southern highland speech has long been very distinctive for its patterns of pronunciation. It says whar for where, thar for there, hard for hired, critter for creature, sartin for certain, a-goin for going, hit for it, he-it for hit, far for fire, deef for deaf, pizen for poison, nekkid for naked, eetch for itch, boosh for bush, wrassle for wrestle, chaney for china, chaw for chew, poosh for push, shet for shut, ba-it for bat, be-it for be, narrer for narrow, winder for window, widder for widow, and young-uns for young ones.³

Its grammar also differs in many details from other English dialects. Verb forms include constructions such as he come in, she done finished, they growed up, the plural they is judged, the interrogative you wasn’t there, was you, the emphatic he done did it, and the use of hoove as a past participle of heave. The indefinite article as she had a one frequently occurred in the southern highlands, as did the emphatic double negative, he don’t have none.⁴ It also used prepositions in a curious ways. In the early nineteenth century, James Parton recorded examples such as “He went till Charleston” and “there never was seen the like of him for mischief.” Par-ton wrote, “ … these are specimens of their talk.”⁵

Southern highland speech also has its own distinctive vocabulary in words such as fornenst (next to), skift (dusting of snow), fixin (getting ready to do something), brickle (brittle), swan (swear), hant (ghost), hate (it ain’t worth a hate), nigh (near), man(husband),cute (attractive), scawmy (misty), lowp (jump), lettin’on (pretend), sparkin (courtin), hippin (a baby’s diaper), bumfuzzled (confused), scoot (slide) and honey as a term of endearment.⁶

This was an earthy dialect. The taboos of Puritan English had little impact on Southern highland speech until the twentieth century. Sexual processes and natural functions were freely used in figurative expressions. Small children, for example, were fondly called “little shits” as a term of endearment. A backcountry granny would say kindly to a little child, “Ain’t you a cute little shit.”⁷ Sexual terms also frequently appeared in backcountry place names, before the Victorians erased them from the maps of this region. In Lunenberg County, Virginia, two small streams were named Tickle Cunt Branch and Fucking Creek.⁸

Scholars generally agree that this language developed from the “northern” or “Northumbrian” English that was spoken in the lowlands of Scotland, in the North of Ireland, and in the border counties of England during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century.⁹ Every vocabulary word which we have noted as typical of American backcountry speech also appears in word lists collected in the English border counties of Cumberland and Westmorland during the nineteenth century. W. Dickson observed, for example, that man was “the term by which a Cumbrian wife refers to her husband,” as in “stand by your man.” He noted that honey was “a term of endearment expressive of great regard” in the English border counties, northern Ireland and the southern lowlands. Dickson and others recorded in Cumbria usages such as let on for tell, scawmy for thick or misty, cute for attractive, nigh for near, fixin for getting ready, and lowp for jump, hoove as a past participle for heave, and lang sen or langseyne for long since. This emphatic double negative had long been common in border speech. One Northumbrian gentleman wrote to another, “I assure your honour I never sold none.”¹⁰

In North Britain, this speech way tended to be broadly similar on both sides of the border. One early nineteenth century student of speech in Cumberland and Westmorland observed that “in the Border and all along the verge of the old Marches or debateable lands the speech of the people is completely Scotch, in everything, excepting that there is but little tone.”¹¹ North of the border, another speech-scholar described the accent of the Scottish lowlands as “nothing more than a corruption of that which is now spoke … in all the northern counties of England.”¹²

This border dialect became the ancester of a distinctive variety of American speech which still flourishes in the southern highlands of the United States. The process of transmission was complex. Southern highland speech was not merely an archaic North British form—this was not a simple story of stasis and replication. New words were required to describe the American environment, and many were coined in the backcountry. Other expressions were borrowed from Indians, Spanish, French and Germans. But the strongest ingredients were the speech ways of North Britain in the seventeenth century.