Appalachian heritage language and Appalachian migration: A sociolinguistic family study

This study qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes a selection of the linguistic features evidenced by one Appalachian family affected by the massive out-migration of Appalachian peoples during the mid-twentieth century. After many years away, some of these Appalachian migrants are returning to their original home communities. Unlike some scholars claim (Smith-Jones 1997), the experience of living away from the home community seems to have had an effect on the migrants' language, in line with other research on mobility and language awareness (Clopper and Pisoni 2006). In analyzing the family's speech corpus of conversational interviews and reading passages, I consider the distribution and frequency of phonological and morphological features commonly associated with Appalachian language varieties across social and linguistic factors that characterize the speakers and linguistic environment. From the observed data, I conclude that migrants' speech has been affected by their time away from the Appalachian home community.