Southern Appalachian English

A Website by Michael Montgomery
Author of Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English
University of Tennessee Press, 2004

Welcome to this website on the speech of one of America's most often misunderstood regions - southern and central Appalachia, which stretches from north Georgia to West Virginia. It's been romanticized as the language of Shakespeare, and it's been caricatured, ridiculed, and dismissed as uneducated, bad grammar, or worse. But too rarely has it been appreciated for what it is: the native speech of millions of Americans that has a distinctive history and that makes Appalachia what it is just as sure as the region's music does.

This website has a wealth of information on the English language spoken in Appalachia. There's fun to be had in exploring it too, but if you're looking for a site that's just for entertainment or one with funny spellings, you've come to the wrong place. Too many of those sites are around already. As a native of East Tennessee and as someone who has heard mountain speech all my life and written about it for more than thirty years, I have designed this site to present not only how Appalachian people talk, but also some of the history and the flavor of that talk.

To visit this very interesting site: Click Here.