Customer Reviews

Southern mountain speech

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Cratis D. Williams has assembled notes upon notes taken from lectures and studies of the appalacian people over the course of his life in kentucky academia and from them came this book, out of Berea University Press, or whatever its called. Highly recommened reading if you're even slightly interested in mountain speech. You'll be amused and laugh for hours on end but may want to take a breather in between as this assortment is rather concentrated in its humour and slang of the appalacian peoples. 4.8 stars

I read this book for a paper I wrote on dialects in the Southern Appalachians. Being a mountain girl myself, I was very interested in the book until I actually read it. It is the most offensive "study" I have ever come across. Granted, from a linguistic perspective, I am not used to such highly subjective studies, but I really did not see the need for the sweeping generalizations and incredulity that Williams provides in this book. "Mountain folk" try to delude outsiders with their unoriginal speech (that they think is highly clever)? Who does that?

There is also an entire chapter on manners, and Williams is downright shocked that these people teach their children to say "please" and "thank you." I'm not sure about other parts of the country, but I thought that was standard politeness. Here is a choice quotation from the beginning of the book: "Contractions, elisions, and telescopings unfamiliar to the cultured outsider . . . produce a poetic quality similar to that of folk epics and the quaint relics of primitive people." As a scholar, I have been taught that no one is primitive, and for a fellow scholar to make such an outlandish claim is just so offensive.

Steer clear of this book.