Until a language is written down, and the population that speaks it becomes mostly literate, the way words are used and pronounced experience relatively frequent change. Once a language hits print, it still changes – but more slowly and less drastically. Because Iceland became literate a thousand years before most of Northern Europe, people who speak modern Icelandic can still make out the pronunciation and meaning of the original Beowulf saga in Old Norse. In contrast, because most of now-UK wasn’t literate until the 17th century, the average modern English speaker cannot read the original Chaucer without training and explanation of how the letters actually look and how the words actually sound.
One of the biggest changes in the English language was the Great Vowel Shift. The GVS was – as the name indicates – was a major transformation of how vowels were pronounced in English words. It happened over time from the mid-1300s to the mid-1600s, so that the way someone who lived in the reign of Henry VII would have pronounced their words very differently than someone who lived in the reign of his granddaughter, Elizabeth I.
During the Great Vowel Shift, the two highest long vowels became diphthongs, and the other five underwent an increase in tongue height with one of them coming to the front. Thus, /i:/ became /aj/ (as in child and rise) and /u:/ became /aw/ (as in loud and mouth). Also, /e:/ became /i:/ (as in three and feet) and /o:/ became /u:/ (as in good and goose). Furthermore, lower version of /e:/ became /e:/ and later /i:/ (as in speak or beam) and the lower version of /o:/ became /o:/ and later /ow/ (as in holy and stone). Finally, /a:/ became /æ:/ and later /ej/ (as in name).
That’s why Shakespeare, coming as he did at the end of the Tudors and the beginning of the Stuarts, has some poetic couplets (such as love rhyming with prove) that sound so weird to the modern ear; the vowels probably matched more closely in pronunciation in his day, but over time love became pronounced /lʌv/ and prove became pronounced /proov/. When Shakespeare was composing his work, love probably sounded like “loe-v” and prove sounded more like “proe-v”.
It was in the midst of the GVS that my ancestors — a hearty mix of Cornish/Welsh/Scottish/English/Native American/African/Converso refugees and immigrants — were coming (voluntarily or not) to America. Most of them landed in Virginia or the Carolinas, and quickly moved upward and westward into the Appalachian Mountains. There they became miners, famers, and moonshine-making outlaws, as their ancestors had done all over Europe and Northern Africa centuries before. Anyone who didn’t look quite as ‘white’ as other members of the community became ‘Portuguese’ or had a “full-blooded Cherokee grandmother” to explain away their tanned skin. Since they spoke English and attended Christian churches like their neighbors, this was usually an acceptable excuse for the more Iberian looking among my kinfolk.
By the time the Revolutionary War sparked in the late 18th century, most of my people had been in Kentucky for at least two generations … and isolated in the hollars of the Bluegrass State they missed out on a lot of the GVS that coastal Americans with closer British ties didn’t. This gave people in the region as district dialect, known as Appalachian English. Although the ‘funny’ words and pronunciations my family used were closer to Shakespeare’s language than the English used by the rest of the USA (and 20th century England), the Appalachian dialect was endlessly mocked as proof that ‘hillbillies’ were dim-witted, inbred, and naturally deserving of our systemic poverty.
Although the Appalachian accent remains strong in the region, modern cultural hominization through mass media – such as television – is eroding the dialect. My cousins and I called baby chickens ‘ditlers’, but our children (and grandchildren) don’t. In part, it’s because most people don’t have subsistence farming anymore, so no one’s grandma is telling them not to try and pick up the biddy hen’s ditlers anymore, but another part of it is that grandparents are now trying to make sure the speak ‘correct’ or standard English, so their grandchildren won’t be mocked as ‘ignorant’. We have learned to devalue our own culture, because it isn’t midwestern enough. There is a fear (no matter how vigorously it is denied) of being seen as a stereotypical Appalachian hillbilly.
But among the older generations, especially around family and friends from youth, the Appalachian dialect still crops up. Not only do I make a note of it when I hear it, lest it be lost, my mom makes note of it for me when it is used by herself, her family, or her friends. It makes for interesting discussions, such as when she was telling my daughters how her family called their legs ‘pied’ when they had red splotches on them from standing too near the cookstove in the winter to get warm. I was then able to tell my daughters that ‘pied’ was the medieval English way of saying “two-colored” or “multicolored”, and that the Pied Piper’s name meant that he was wearing colorful clothes.
Just recently, one of the ladies at my mother’s church told her they were having trouble on the family farm with cows ‘stobbing’ at each other with their horns. It reminded my mother that her family had used that phrase too – only in relation to cows poking one another with their horns. I am pretty certain it is a linguistic anachronism from when the vowel in the word ‘stabbing’ was pronounced like the /ɒ/ in bob rather than like the /æ/ in “bad” before (or during) the GVS. My best guess as to why it remained a farming word is that the idea of ‘stabbing’ of person wasn’t called stabbing as much in my grandparents generation; a person assaulted with a blade was ‘knifed’. Being knifed denoted a violent action against a person, while stabbing/stobbing was an animal action against another animal.
The Appalachian dialect isn’t the only place English words or pronunciations no longer used in UK have hung around in America. For example, many Americans say they haven’t seen ‘hide nor hair’ of something when its lost, which is a phrase from Chaucer’s England that people in England don’t typically use anymore. Americans have lots of avenues in their cities and towns, which describes a wide road, but in England an avenue eventually came to mean only a road lined with trees or the line of trees themselves. The English language evolved, and is evolving still, especially as globalization brings even more ‘loan words’ – like ennui, kindergarten, and entrepreneur – into the British/American lexicon. But is mainly in Appalachia that you can still here words pounced and used in the way that people in Medieval Britain would recognize.