Buckrub
05-05-2013, 09:42 PM
Good article. I am disappointed they didn't include "Tump Over". I almost fainted the day I found out that wasn't in the dictionary.
Do you speak Arkansas?
Natural state has own mix of (fading) regional dialects
By Frank Fellone
Susan Young was in rural Tennessee not so long ago, in the Smokies, when she stopped at a convenience store on a cool morning.
“It’s a mite airish,” she said to the store clerk.
“And he knew exactly what I meant.”
Certainly. Because Young, of Fayetteville, and the clerk in the Great Smoky Mountains are linguistic kinfolk, related via a dialect known as South Midland.
More about this later.
Young told this story recently in Little Rock, where she spoke to about 50 people about Ozarks language. She’s the outreach coordinator at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. Her reaching out on that day was at the main library downtown.
In the audience was Monica Mylonas, who has been thinking a lot lately about the Southern dialect and its tendency toward monophthongization.
More about this later.
Young is a fifth-generation Ozarker. She grew up hearing old and beautiful words in her family and in a little country church.
The language of the Ozarks is one of her favorite talks, others being moonshine and the history of country churches, topics popular with the public.
“Folks want to hear about the traditional way of life,” she said, “and the way we talk is part of that traditional way of life.”
Frankly, Ozark language can be larruping, her favorite Ozark word, meaning tasty. Larruping can be traced back to an Old English word meaning “to beat.” As in: “Mama’s coconut pie is hard to beat.”
Or, simply put, it’s larrupin’ good.
Old English? As in Chaucerian or Elizabethan? Yes, but only to a point. Young dismisses the notion that Ozarks speech was frozen in time. She disses the myth of some old boy in a holler in Newton County who is downright Shakespearean. But there are some words that linger over the centuries.
Axe - is in ask, comes right out of Chaucer.
Heap - a lot, also traced to Chaucer’s day.
Chimley - chimney, thank you, Sir Walter Scott.
Plat -to plait or braid. See Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 4, in which Mercutio, joshing around with Romeo, makes reference to Queen Mab, a fairy in Celtic folklore. Quoth Mercutio: “This is that very Mab that plats the manes of horses in the night and bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs, which once untangled much misfortune bodes.”
“When I hear these words today it’s music to my heart,” Young said.
Walk across the holler, the narrow valley called Rock Street, and there is Mylonas, an assistant archivist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture. She labors to organize historical materials in a logical manner in order to make them accessible to the public. In her spare time she likes to research and write.
So she has written for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas an entry on Arkansas dialects, to be published soon by the online reference work.
What Mylonas has found, in what she calls broad strokes, are two main dialects in Arkansas. There is the South Midland. There is the Southern. They commingle, and experts will find others, but these two are “overarching.”
If drawn on a map, the border between South Midland and Southern would roughly go from Southwest Arkansas to Northeast Arkansas, splitting the rectangle of Arkansas into two triangles.
Credit the westward migration of the American people.
“There was a lateral shift” in migration in the 19th century, Mylonas said, “and Arkansas was in the way.”
Americans from the Appalachian states - North Carolina, South Carolina Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri - generally settled in the highlands of Arkansas. Americans from the South, farmers from the fertile lowlands of Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama - generally went to the Arkansas Delta. All of them brought their speech.
The dialects differ in the way the letter R is used. Or not used.
Southern Midland is rhotic. That is, the R is always pronounced - butter. In the Southern, non-rhotic, dialectic, the R is soft - buttah. Southern Midland is so fond of the R that it’s sometimes put into a word where it doesn’t belong - warsh the dishes.
Things have different names as well. In South Midland green beans are, well, green beans, and peanuts are peanuts. In Southern they’re snap beans and goobers.
And in the Southern dialect the medial consonants are dropped. Help becomes hep. Bulb becomes bub. Wolf becomes woof. As for monophthongization, it’s the way folks say sahn rather than sign.
Language keeps moving. Mylonas learned that previous research shows older people with a wider variety of dialect and vocabulary. Babies were pushed in a pram, carriage or perambulator rather than a stroller. Fences came in all kinds, but to today’s young people, “a fence is a fence.”
Media change language.Advertising can “cement a word in our dialect. All carbonated drinks are Coke. All tissue is Kleenex.”
Urbanization changes the language, as does standardized education. The latter is “a leveling influence,” Mylonas said, “teaching children to speak and write in the same way.”
That rough line, Mylonas said, might be harder to plot today, the geographic distinctions not as pronounced, dialects blended or commingled.
“Some people,” she said, “might call that the creation of a new dialect.”
Young can go on and on with Ozark words and expressions.
Battlin’ stick - a club used to beat the dirt out of clothes before washing them in the branch. Or creek. Never, Young said, has she heard the word said as crick. “That comes from people trying to write in what they think is the dialect.”
Booger - a ghost or supernatural being. A haint. A boogerman.
Carry on - behave boisterously.
Chillern - children. “When I hear that pronunciation today, it’s like gold.”
Fireboard - mantel. “Grandma had a fancy clock on the fireboard that she brought from Kentucky.”
Gaum up - mess up.
Goozle - throat.
Granny woman - a midwife.
Look - examine. As in: “Look you over for ticks.” Not a bad idea, come to think of it.
Loosenin’ weed - a plant used as a laxative. “The granny woman knew if you got constipated you’d go in the woods and get some loosenin’ weed.”
Passel - a lot. As in a passel of chillern.
Proud - pleased.
Right smart - a lot. “I done a right smart lot of canning in my day.”
Sull - pout, or all sulled up.
Take up books - an expression used “by little old ladies who taught school.” They would go to class, where the students would take up books.
The tail end of hard times - rough.
A nose running like a sugar tree - a runny nose, like a sugar maple and its sap.
I’ll tie a knot in your tail - said by mothers to children, and usually meaning strike one.
Are we losing our dialects? Is our language becoming homogenized?
Yes, says Mike Luster, director of the Arkansas Folklife Program at Arkansas State University, “but not as completely as people would believe.”
He told a story on himself.
“I realized I had a skill as a folklorist when my daughter asked me, “How come you speak different to everyone you talk to?’
“If you speak to people with a distinct regional accent you tend to speak like them. When I talk to people from church communities I tend to move into word choices consistent with that.
“Yeah, there is a media-driven cultural drift toward homogenization, but there is also a deep need for us to mark ourselves with the markers of home. One of the ways people do that is speaking in distinctive ways, or eating distinctive foods.What do you do when you go home? You cruise the old roads. Grandma cooks the favorite meal. And you want to be with folks who talk like you.”
Speech is always in transition, Luster said, and has overlapping circles of geography, religion, occupation and avocation.
“Will we all talk like Tom Brokaw? I don’t think so. And I don’t think that when Tom Brokaw is off work he talks like Tom Brokaw, either.”
And now, folks, it’s time to leave, with a dose of courtesy on the part of the host and the guest. This is how it should be done, Young said.
“No need for you to rush off.”
“You’d better come go with me.”
Do you speak Arkansas?
Natural state has own mix of (fading) regional dialects
By Frank Fellone
Susan Young was in rural Tennessee not so long ago, in the Smokies, when she stopped at a convenience store on a cool morning.
“It’s a mite airish,” she said to the store clerk.
“And he knew exactly what I meant.”
Certainly. Because Young, of Fayetteville, and the clerk in the Great Smoky Mountains are linguistic kinfolk, related via a dialect known as South Midland.
More about this later.
Young told this story recently in Little Rock, where she spoke to about 50 people about Ozarks language. She’s the outreach coordinator at the Shiloh Museum of Ozark History in Springdale. Her reaching out on that day was at the main library downtown.
In the audience was Monica Mylonas, who has been thinking a lot lately about the Southern dialect and its tendency toward monophthongization.
More about this later.
Young is a fifth-generation Ozarker. She grew up hearing old and beautiful words in her family and in a little country church.
The language of the Ozarks is one of her favorite talks, others being moonshine and the history of country churches, topics popular with the public.
“Folks want to hear about the traditional way of life,” she said, “and the way we talk is part of that traditional way of life.”
Frankly, Ozark language can be larruping, her favorite Ozark word, meaning tasty. Larruping can be traced back to an Old English word meaning “to beat.” As in: “Mama’s coconut pie is hard to beat.”
Or, simply put, it’s larrupin’ good.
Old English? As in Chaucerian or Elizabethan? Yes, but only to a point. Young dismisses the notion that Ozarks speech was frozen in time. She disses the myth of some old boy in a holler in Newton County who is downright Shakespearean. But there are some words that linger over the centuries.
Axe - is in ask, comes right out of Chaucer.
Heap - a lot, also traced to Chaucer’s day.
Chimley - chimney, thank you, Sir Walter Scott.
Plat -to plait or braid. See Romeo and Juliet, Act 1, Scene 4, in which Mercutio, joshing around with Romeo, makes reference to Queen Mab, a fairy in Celtic folklore. Quoth Mercutio: “This is that very Mab that plats the manes of horses in the night and bakes the elflocks in foul sluttish hairs, which once untangled much misfortune bodes.”
“When I hear these words today it’s music to my heart,” Young said.
Walk across the holler, the narrow valley called Rock Street, and there is Mylonas, an assistant archivist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock Center for Arkansas History and Culture. She labors to organize historical materials in a logical manner in order to make them accessible to the public. In her spare time she likes to research and write.
So she has written for the Encyclopedia of Arkansas an entry on Arkansas dialects, to be published soon by the online reference work.
What Mylonas has found, in what she calls broad strokes, are two main dialects in Arkansas. There is the South Midland. There is the Southern. They commingle, and experts will find others, but these two are “overarching.”
If drawn on a map, the border between South Midland and Southern would roughly go from Southwest Arkansas to Northeast Arkansas, splitting the rectangle of Arkansas into two triangles.
Credit the westward migration of the American people.
“There was a lateral shift” in migration in the 19th century, Mylonas said, “and Arkansas was in the way.”
Americans from the Appalachian states - North Carolina, South Carolina Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri - generally settled in the highlands of Arkansas. Americans from the South, farmers from the fertile lowlands of Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama - generally went to the Arkansas Delta. All of them brought their speech.
The dialects differ in the way the letter R is used. Or not used.
Southern Midland is rhotic. That is, the R is always pronounced - butter. In the Southern, non-rhotic, dialectic, the R is soft - buttah. Southern Midland is so fond of the R that it’s sometimes put into a word where it doesn’t belong - warsh the dishes.
Things have different names as well. In South Midland green beans are, well, green beans, and peanuts are peanuts. In Southern they’re snap beans and goobers.
And in the Southern dialect the medial consonants are dropped. Help becomes hep. Bulb becomes bub. Wolf becomes woof. As for monophthongization, it’s the way folks say sahn rather than sign.
Language keeps moving. Mylonas learned that previous research shows older people with a wider variety of dialect and vocabulary. Babies were pushed in a pram, carriage or perambulator rather than a stroller. Fences came in all kinds, but to today’s young people, “a fence is a fence.”
Media change language.Advertising can “cement a word in our dialect. All carbonated drinks are Coke. All tissue is Kleenex.”
Urbanization changes the language, as does standardized education. The latter is “a leveling influence,” Mylonas said, “teaching children to speak and write in the same way.”
That rough line, Mylonas said, might be harder to plot today, the geographic distinctions not as pronounced, dialects blended or commingled.
“Some people,” she said, “might call that the creation of a new dialect.”
Young can go on and on with Ozark words and expressions.
Battlin’ stick - a club used to beat the dirt out of clothes before washing them in the branch. Or creek. Never, Young said, has she heard the word said as crick. “That comes from people trying to write in what they think is the dialect.”
Booger - a ghost or supernatural being. A haint. A boogerman.
Carry on - behave boisterously.
Chillern - children. “When I hear that pronunciation today, it’s like gold.”
Fireboard - mantel. “Grandma had a fancy clock on the fireboard that she brought from Kentucky.”
Gaum up - mess up.
Goozle - throat.
Granny woman - a midwife.
Look - examine. As in: “Look you over for ticks.” Not a bad idea, come to think of it.
Loosenin’ weed - a plant used as a laxative. “The granny woman knew if you got constipated you’d go in the woods and get some loosenin’ weed.”
Passel - a lot. As in a passel of chillern.
Proud - pleased.
Right smart - a lot. “I done a right smart lot of canning in my day.”
Sull - pout, or all sulled up.
Take up books - an expression used “by little old ladies who taught school.” They would go to class, where the students would take up books.
The tail end of hard times - rough.
A nose running like a sugar tree - a runny nose, like a sugar maple and its sap.
I’ll tie a knot in your tail - said by mothers to children, and usually meaning strike one.
Are we losing our dialects? Is our language becoming homogenized?
Yes, says Mike Luster, director of the Arkansas Folklife Program at Arkansas State University, “but not as completely as people would believe.”
He told a story on himself.
“I realized I had a skill as a folklorist when my daughter asked me, “How come you speak different to everyone you talk to?’
“If you speak to people with a distinct regional accent you tend to speak like them. When I talk to people from church communities I tend to move into word choices consistent with that.
“Yeah, there is a media-driven cultural drift toward homogenization, but there is also a deep need for us to mark ourselves with the markers of home. One of the ways people do that is speaking in distinctive ways, or eating distinctive foods.What do you do when you go home? You cruise the old roads. Grandma cooks the favorite meal. And you want to be with folks who talk like you.”
Speech is always in transition, Luster said, and has overlapping circles of geography, religion, occupation and avocation.
“Will we all talk like Tom Brokaw? I don’t think so. And I don’t think that when Tom Brokaw is off work he talks like Tom Brokaw, either.”
And now, folks, it’s time to leave, with a dose of courtesy on the part of the host and the guest. This is how it should be done, Young said.
“No need for you to rush off.”
“You’d better come go with me.”