Listening to Letters: Appalachian Englishes Across a Century
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Listening to Letters: Appalachian Englishes Across a Century
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What did you think of this episode?
What did Appalachian English sound like before anyone could hit “record”?
In this episode revisit from Season 1, I’m doing a little linguistic time travel using letters instead of audio. I take a close look at two personal letters written nearly a century apart:
• one from 1862, during the Civil War, and
• one from 1954, written by a woman in Lee County, Virginia
On the surface, they’re just everyday letters. But read closely, they’re packed with clues about how people actually spoke.
We're using a method called content analysis, which is a fancy name for paying very close attention to spelling, grammar, and word choice. Before audio recording, and before widespread formal schooling, many people wrote the way they talked. That means these letters preserve dialect features we’d otherwise never hear.
So, what sticks around? What changes? And what can a pair of ordinary letters tell us about Appalachian speech across nearly 100 years?
In this episode, we’ll talk about:
- How linguists study speech from the past without recordings
- Why “nonstandard” spelling is actually a goldmine
- Appalachian dialect features that show up again and again
- What language continuity tells us about place, community, and identity
Voice work: Brock Davidson (Civil War Soldier) and Addison Hutchison (Lee County woman)
Ivy Attic CoJewelry from coal, river glass, and discarded books handcrafted in the central Appalachian Mountains
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Unless another artist is featured, acoustic music on most episodes: "Freight Train" written by Elizabeth Cotten and performed by Landon Spain
