Disappearing Heritage? Exploring the Relationship Between Language Change in Appalachia and the Education System

Abstract

Previous research has examined language change in Appalachia and has found that many Appalachian speech features are fading. Based on previous research and personal experiences, I wanted to better understand the role of the education system in affecting speech and language shifts in Appalachia. My research sought to answer two questions: is there a relationship between an Appalachian person's education level and how they use Appalachian dialectal features in their speech, and what can we learn about that relationship from hearing the experiences of Appalachian people? In order to answer these questions, I interviewed fourteen Appalachians from three adjacent counties in Western North Carolina and North Georgia. There was a range of ages and educational levels amongst the participants. I conducted a sociolinguistic interview with each participant, seeking to elicit specific speech features in tasks with varying degrees of control, ending with a free narrative section of the interview in which I asked participants for stories. Then, with four of my participants, I continued the interview to gain more qualitative data, asking them about their experiences as Appalachians, especially in the education system. From my data, I found that education level is correlated with statistical significance to the use of final vowel reduction and was-leveling, but not to monophthongization. However, I also found that other factors, such as age, gender, and having lived outside of Appalachia were also significantly correlated with these speech features. By using my qualitative data to contextualize the quantitative, it became clear that language change in Appalachia is very complex and involves several interlocutory factors, including education level, that affect how Appalachian English speakers interact with their communities and dialect. The role that the education system has on language change in Appalachia is pervasive, not because it is the biggest or sole actor in Appalachian language change, but because it upholds a race and class-based hierarchy and maintains a system of inequality through the control and standardization of language. This hierarchy can be harmful to Appalachians as well as other language-minoritized groups by creating barriers that prevent them from accessing certain opportunities. More research is needed to better understand language change and education in Appalachia, not because the dialect or heritage is necessarily disappearing, but because it's important to understand the barriers that Appalachians and others face due to the control of language so that those oppressive systems can be broken down.