Educated People Do Not Speak Like That: A Reflection on Gettin’ Above My Raisin’

Growing up in the Appalachian region I never read books whose characters talked like me. Early on, stories, for the most part, focused on Dick and Jane’s stilted language patterns and, later, on characters who spoke grammatically correct Standard English. For that matter, I did not hear my speech coming from the mouths of classroom teachers and was, more than once, admonished to say knew instead of knowed, grew instead of growed. I recognized that my use of the word youns as the plural for you would cause my teachers to cringe, thus signifying my lack of intellect. After countless reprimands that “educated people do not speak like that,” I attempted to change my spoken dialect only to be told by Mamaw, my grandmother, that “I was gettin’ above my raisin’.”

My language lessons concerning what was wrong with how I talked continued throughout my academic career. Fast-forward to graduate school where I encountered a linguistics professor and learned that the primary purpose of language is for communication and that no one individual dialect is superior to another, similar to O’Mahony’s (2018) stance that each dialect has its own merits and a right to exist alongside other dialects. Yet, the very educator who shared this insight corrected my pronunciation of Appalachia, insisting that my native use of the short /a/ in the third syllable was wrong. She modeled the “correct” way to say it (long /a/ in the third syllable) and told me if I failed to change it I would, effectively, be telling the world that I knew nothing about language.

This seemed to contradict her earlier assertion and left me contemplating language in general. Were my speech patterns, word pronunciations, and vocabulary usage wrong? Was I (and everyone in my region) somehow lacking in intelligence because of the Appalachian dialect that characterized the way I talked? Fast forward again to a middle school English language arts (ELA) classroom where I, the teacher, after much soul-searching and interaction with students who spoke rich Appalachian dialects, finally, arrived at an answer. No. No, my dialect is not wrong and has no bearing on my intelligence nor on that of the students who occupy my classes. Having reached my own epiphany, I vowed that I would never make students feel that they are somehow inferior because of their vernacular.

Today, as a professor at a university situated within the Appalachian region, I celebrate dialect diversity within the courses I teach. Appalachian English, a recognized marginalized language variety (Siegel, 2006; Clark & Hayward, 2013; Cummings-Lilly & Forrest-Bank, 2019), is my own dialectical heritage and that of my students. As such, I especially focus on it while reinforcing the notion that home languages, i.e., dialects, have a place in educational circles.

I routinely share with the pre-service teachers who populate my classes that Standard English is a dialect just like Appalachian English and other dialect varieties. But it has to go beyond this one statement. I want them to build their future students up in their use of their home languages, to help children see the value in native speech patterns and to know, as Winchester (2020) shares, no single voice can represent an entire region.

Finding one’s place on the map is not always easy when speaking a language variety that is not conventional. Yet, we all long to see ourselves, our culture, our language, our voiceplace, that place where “the ruggedness of landscape and life [shape] the language,” ((Lyon, 2014, p. 185) represented in the mainstream.

There is no escaping the impact Appalachia as a place has on a speaker and, much like Lyon, I too believe that you must “trust your first voice—the one tuned by the people and place that made you—before you can speak your deepest truths” (p. 187). “You can’t be a voice box for your own feelings and experiences, much less for those of your place,” she continues, “if you’ve accepted the teaching that your first speech was wrong” (p. 192). She’s, of course, right.

References:
Clark, A. and Hayward, N. (Ed.). (2013)., Talking Appalachian: Voice, identity, and community, Appalachian studies. 27. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_appalachian_studies/27

Cummings-Lilly, Karen T. and Forrest-Bank, Shandra S. (2019) “Understanding Appalachiann Microaggression from the Perspective of Community College Students in Southern West Virginia,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: 46(2), Article 5. Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/jssw/vol46/iss2/5

Lyon, G.E. (2014). Voiceplace. In A.D. Clark & N.M. Hayward (Eds.), Talking Appalachian: Voice, identity, and community (pp. 185-192). University Press of Kentucky.

O’Mahony, C.T. (2018). An analysis of dialects and how they are neither linguistically superior nor inferior to one another. International Journal of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, 4(5), 221-226. doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.20469/ijhss.4.10004-5

Siegel, J. (2006). Language ideologies and the education of speakers of marginalized language varieties: Adopting a critical awareness approach. Linguistics and Education, 17(2), 157-174.

Winchester, K. (2020, Dec. 11). 15 books about Appalachia to read instead of Hillbilly Elegy [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://bookriot.com/books-about-appalachia/