Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2007

Charles Packer wrote:

Wayne Brown answered:

Charles Packer said:

West Virginia has several different main dialects, which have
been dying out in their original forms after native-born
inhabitants left the poverty-stricken state by the hundreds of
thousands, beginning in the 1950s, in search of work in other
parts of the United States. The dialect feature you referred to
was once common in the southern half of the state, between
Charleston and the Kentucky state line, and south of Huntington,
starting roughly at about Fort Gay and continuing all along the
Big Sandy and Tug River Fork through Crum and Kermit past
Williamson and Matewan to the Virginia state line as well as
north of the two rivers, in towns and villages scattered among
the Appalachian mountains. Blacks, however, were never strongly
represented in the area. Before the Civil War, there were few
slaves in that extremely mountainous part of what was then
Virginia with little farming and little need for slave labor.
When West Virginia became independent of Virginia and was
granted statehood in 1863, few blacks were in the state, and few
migrated there, although strict racial segregation was in place
for the few who were there. Huntington had a segregated black
community, but the city dialect was not typical of the southern
rural variations to be heard farther down the road, to the
southeast. The largest black community in the midst of a real
dialect area was probably in Williamson. The dialect words and
phrases coined by blacks were imaginative, catchy, often
humorous, even hilarious, and were often adopted by whites
although, despite a number of shared features like the usage in
your question, the various white dialects, which predominated in
the state, differed distinctly from the black ones in
pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and syntax.

Regards, ----- WB.