![]() ![]() It’s of course a myth that is still being repeated by many to this day. Is it true? It doesn’t quite sound like it, though it is a unique kind of speech. Isolated from the outside world, and shut in by natural barriers, they have for more than two centuries preserved much of the language of Elizabethan England.” ![]() These four million mountaineers of the South from West Virginia to northern Alabama form the body of what is perhaps the purest Old English blood to be found among English-speaking peoples. Josiah Combs claimed that “the Southern mountaineers are the conservators of Old, Early, and Elizabethan English in the New World. Others go even further and claim that “the dialect of the Appalachian people is the oldest living English dialect, older than the speech of Shakespeare, closer to the speech of Chaucer,” apparently preserved by a brutally impoverished rural existence in the isolation of their mountain fastness, with little contact from the modern civilizing ways of outsiders. In fact, some say that the speech of the southern mountaineers is “pure Elizabethan English” just as Shakespeare would have spoken it. Well even if Appalachia is America’s mythical Illyria, where rugged mountain men and folk heroes like Daniel Boone roam about checking on their moonshine, some think Shakespeare might feel right at home. As the linguistic legend goes, the Appalachian dialect is reputedly so odd and so archaic, hundreds of years out of step with the rest of the English-speaking world, that you “might could” ask, as Shakespeare would have it, “What country, friends, is this?” I took a slow and southerly journey through the Appalachian mountains this summer, hoping to hear the strains of some lost southern speech emerging from hill to hollow along its twisted roads.
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