You might call it a branch of the Jim Wayne Miller school of literary humanism. Miller was a soft-spoken man raised in the country near Asheville, NC, who became both an award-winning poet best-known for his mountain-rooted "Brier" poems and also a professor of German and a translator of Goethe. He spoke once at a conference I attended at the Pine Mtn. Settlement School in Kentucky. What he said has never left me: everyone needs to hear the the stories of people from around the world, because it is the local that informs the universal; it is by sharing the common experience that we permeate the barrier of otherness. I think that is true not only of stories, but of the voices themselves telling them.
Otherness, however, is the brute that seems always to shove its way onto the scene. Nothing quite shakes my faith in humanity like yet another video showing an "American" going ballistic on a complete stranger for having a "foreign" accent or speaking a "foreign" language. What kind of force motivates them? Is it ever justified?
It is a force not to be underestimated, even in connection with what might seem to be trivial matters. I speak from personal experience.
Of all the important issues in the world, the pronunciation of "Appalachia" might not seem to be a big deal. However, I can attest that there are those who consider it to be a matter of extreme importance. With them, it is a black and white issue: you are right, or you are wrong. And being wrong puts you at risk of being shunned or relegated to "enemy" status.
Let me be clear: I have been judged wrong on the issue, and the force of animosity directed at me for my perceived wrongness was, to me, staggering. What made it most inexplicable was that it came from professional educators or academicians.
Furthermore, it's not like I was myself oppositional -- except insofar as I was disagreeing with the opinion that there is only one, correct pronunciation. My position is that there are well-established regional differences in how to pronounce "Appalachia" or "Appalachian." The second "a" is either long or short. Both are respectable. Yes, how you say it will identify whether or not you're from the South, but so what? Vive la difference!
My model for understanding on this matter is the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC), which is made up of volunteer groups up and down the trail who work for the same thing and love it the same way, no matter how they pronounce it. Maine isn't Georgia, and vice-versa. We don't expect them to talk the same, and why would we want them to anyway?
No amount of rationalizing on my part did anything to blunt the force of pronunciational correctness. It might even have made it worse. "I thought you were supposed to be from around here. Why are you defending Yankees?" Which is gaslighting, of course. I was not defending Yankees. I was defending both pronunciations. I was defending Southerners who say what they say as well as Yankees who say what they say. That is a clear distinction that the true believers could not see or understand.
Invariably one of the true believers will favor me with what they believe to be the last word on the subject: novelist Sharyn McCrumb's snide dismissal of any other pronunciation than the Southern one, in which she makes an inapposite use of the Derry/Londonderry dichotomy as an analogy for the short-a / long-a controversy of "Appalachia." If you haven't seen it, it's worth a look.
What is wrong with her analogy? If nothing else, Derry/Londonderry refers to a change brought to a well-worn, popular, local usage of great antiquity. Unhappily for the McCrumblicans, that is not the case with "Appalachia."
David Walls, who wrote the entry on pronunciation of the word in The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, says in "On the Naming of Appalachia" that "[o]verall, the social movement to obtain recognition for Appalachia as a problem area must be accorded a remarkable success for a movement which never developed a mass following within the region itself," and that "Appalachian" is still not the prevailing way people in the area identify themselves.
Walls's points are amplified by Anita Puckett, the director of the Appalachian Studies Program at Virginia Tech, in her article "On the Pronunciation of Appalachia" in 2000 for Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine. "[D]espite all these feelings on both sides of the pronunciation issue, there is one fact we must keep in mind: Most residents of the region rarely use the word Appalachia in their day-to-day interactions with their friends and neighbors" partly because their "vernacular's underlying sound-and-stress patterns don't lend themselves to either pronunciation."
Further evidence that the term may not have been in wide use as an accepted identifier for the region until after the Federal government created it in 1965 can be found on this Reddit thread (and other similar ones on Reddit) which provide as many data points as Puckett does in an academic paper, and in which south-central Appalachians who use the Northern pronunciation discuss the shallow roots of the word "Appalachia" in popular usage.
What is especially interesting about this thread is a comment that exactly mirrors one made by Puckett in her article. After saying that both (my emphasis) pronunciations have "essentially negative connotations," she then describes a southeastern Kentucky community who "clearly associate the long-a form with media 'spies,' government officials, and missionary 'do-gooders' who 'don't know nothing about us.'" The Reddit comment -- by someone from southeastern Kentucky whose native pronunciation is the long-a -- provides direct evidence of a negative response to the short-a usage that takes the form of a verbal caricature of a "smarty-pants perfessor."
Furthermore, the person credited by David Walls with bringing "Appalachia" as a concept into the modern American literary imagination, Horace Kephart, wrote in 1913 that the highlanders among whom he lived did not use the term for their own mountains, which they called "the Alleghanies."
Meanwhile, for their part, the Yankees got a jump on the modern usage anyway: the Boston-based Appalachian Mountain Club has published a journal called Appalachia since 1894. Guess how it's pronounced.
What's going on here? With McCrumb and her ilk (a perfectly good Scots word implying no disparagement) I think the answer is political, and has to do with the Appalachian Regional Commission, the "imperialist" (as McCrumb would say) body charged by the Feds in 1965 with regional development. According to Puckett, ARC's official pronunciation is the long-a Yankee one, while most of the region is in the South, where most of the people -- if and when they say it -- use the short-a. Puckett has an interesting insider's take on how the controversy developed: in the "more circumscribed academic setting … [t]here were consistent efforts to promulgate this pronunciation of Appalachia [short-a] no matter what the context. … Both faculty and students considered the [short] a pronunciation a positively valued symbol of membership in and knowledge about the region."
The pronunciational controversy, then, is of recent vintage, and it flourishes in rarefied air. All of my vituperous detractors on this subject are either academics or should-be academics. As far as I can tell, their outrage is a defensive response to the standardization of a pronunciation that is non-Southern. In some cases the outrage is informed by the fact that all the geographico-historical cognates -- the Appalachicolas and the Appalachees -- line up with the Southern pronunciation, which if nothing else lends a quaint air of Biblical inerrancy to their cause.
If in fact the ARC has an unbending policy that privileges the long-a pronunciation, it should change it. It should at least adopt a flexible policy of "say what the local academics say" (c'mon, y'all, laugh). Let the "all pronunciations welcome" example of the Appalachian Trail be the model.
As for the short-a academics, their close-minded attitude of "I've already done all the research" shuts off what could be some fascinating lines of academic inquiry, e.g. how, when, and where did the "standard," long-a pronunciation appear? How did Washington Irving pronounce "Appalachia" in his famous 1839 article -- in which he proposed that the "America" in USA be replaced with either "Alleghania" or "Appalachia" (he preferred the former) -- and which usage Walls says, via A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles, marked the first appearance of "Appalachia" in American English.
Also: how widespread in fact was the usage "Appalachia" in the Southern Appalachian region when the government declared it to be a problem area in 1965? David Walls implies that the adjective "Appalachian" or the noun form "Appalachians" (for the mountains) were much more widespread than "Appalachia;" how much moreso? And does this matter? I would say it does: Appalachia Nouveau's most important signification is economic, social, and cultural, while Appalachian / Appalachians is mostly a geographic / geologic signifier.
My hypothesis is that academicians, in their beef against the ARC, have gilded the lily of the short-a "Appalachia" and have promoted it with unintended, xenophobic consequences, as borne out by the anecdote that opens Puckett's article: In 1998 she took an Appalachian folk culture class to visit a potter, who, originally from Illinois, had "lived and worked near Blacksburg, VA, for over 20 years;" the man was "very knowledgeable about the history and lore of Southern Appalachian pottery-making." The field trip concluded, Puckett asked her students' opinion of the experience. One student dismissed the potter as having no value because he had said "Appalachia" with a long a. In the student's words, "I knew he had nothing to say to me."
Here, then, is someone after Sharyn McCrumb's heart, completely devaluing a person's evident knowledge because of the way he pronounced "Appalachia." My bet is that the potter was naive in his pronunciation: that was how he'd always said it, and surely people would judge him for the quality of his bowls rather than the length of his vowels. Sorry, mister potter. The Jim Wayne Miller language of your bowls is too deep for Appalachia Nouveau Cliche. Fail to use the shibboleth at your own risk.
Perhaps, though, the concluding comment in an online thread discussing this topic says it best: "What a total waste of good energy." Which is what my argument about pronunciation comes down to. If that is your shibboleth -- your test for who is friend and who is foe -- you are not just indulging in prejudicial, ignorant, and superficial xenophobia, you are missing the whole point about contemporary Appalachia, which very much comes down to a question of who is friend and who is foe.
That question is best answered by Harry Caudill -- whose description of Appalachia in Night Comes to the Cumberlands served as a goad to the consciences of JFK and LBJ -- in his 1973 essay "O Appalachia!" (Regrettably there doesn't appear to be an online version, but it is anthologized in Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia, Higgs and Manning, eds.), in which he divides Appalachia into Appalachia One and Appalachia Two: the Appalachia of Wealth and the Appalachia of Poverty.
While mostly a scathing twelve-year review of the "costly failure" of ARC -- in his opinion a vastly inadequate, under-resourced response that exists "to please, or at least avoid conflict with, Appalachia One" -- the essay serves as a useful stand-in for determining who the good guys and bad guys are.
The latter include, yes, the long-a pronouncing extractive corporations headquartered in New York and Philadelphia, but they also include "the 'bighearted country boys' beholden only to the corporate overlords who financed their campaigns." And I know from personal experience that some of those corporate overlords have their headquarters in downtown Appalachia; bluegrass is their hobby, and you can't distinguish their pronunciation from the country-boy elected officials: it's short-a to a man, and the more syrup the better.
Other than the "downtrodden" themselves, the good guys include the "platoons" of VISTA workers sent by the Great Society to help. These soon found out about Appalachia One and began to spread the word in the region, "whereupon a lively time in the hills ensued. Boards of education were beset by people demanding better schools. It was all entertaining and encouraging while it lasted. But sleeping dogs were aroused. ... VISTA was decried as Communist and un-American. ... The Great Society withdrew its soldiers from the War on Poverty, and Appalachia One settled back to digest the region undisturbed." I wonder how many of those "encouraging" VISTA workers doing the good work failed to pronounce the shibboleth of the insider? No doubt quite a few, if not most.
Caudill's conclusion is worth repeating:
That question is best answered by Harry Caudill -- whose description of Appalachia in Night Comes to the Cumberlands served as a goad to the consciences of JFK and LBJ -- in his 1973 essay "O Appalachia!" (Regrettably there doesn't appear to be an online version, but it is anthologized in Voices from the Hills: Selected Readings of Southern Appalachia, Higgs and Manning, eds.), in which he divides Appalachia into Appalachia One and Appalachia Two: the Appalachia of Wealth and the Appalachia of Poverty.
While mostly a scathing twelve-year review of the "costly failure" of ARC -- in his opinion a vastly inadequate, under-resourced response that exists "to please, or at least avoid conflict with, Appalachia One" -- the essay serves as a useful stand-in for determining who the good guys and bad guys are.
The latter include, yes, the long-a pronouncing extractive corporations headquartered in New York and Philadelphia, but they also include "the 'bighearted country boys' beholden only to the corporate overlords who financed their campaigns." And I know from personal experience that some of those corporate overlords have their headquarters in downtown Appalachia; bluegrass is their hobby, and you can't distinguish their pronunciation from the country-boy elected officials: it's short-a to a man, and the more syrup the better.
Other than the "downtrodden" themselves, the good guys include the "platoons" of VISTA workers sent by the Great Society to help. These soon found out about Appalachia One and began to spread the word in the region, "whereupon a lively time in the hills ensued. Boards of education were beset by people demanding better schools. It was all entertaining and encouraging while it lasted. But sleeping dogs were aroused. ... VISTA was decried as Communist and un-American. ... The Great Society withdrew its soldiers from the War on Poverty, and Appalachia One settled back to digest the region undisturbed." I wonder how many of those "encouraging" VISTA workers doing the good work failed to pronounce the shibboleth of the insider? No doubt quite a few, if not most.
Caudill's conclusion is worth repeating:
The modern Appalachian welfare reservation makes few demands on its inhabitants. They are left alone in their crumbling coal camps and along their littered creeks to follow lives almost as individualistic, as backward looking and tradition ridden, as fatalistic and resigned as in those days three or four wars ago before the welfare check replaced the grubbing hoe and shovel as pot fillers. Then a man needed to know the seasons and the vagaries of the bossman if he were to eat. But new skills are required in an age when government is gigantic, when a few men with giant machines can drag from the ground all the fuel a nation can consume, and when the poor are of little use to the well-to-do. It pays to sense winners and vote for them -- and to let them know of one's intention in advance. And one must recognize that there are powers that cannot be overturned or defied, and so one does not resist. Once these concessions are made it is generally possible to enjoy many of the freedoms and prerogatives of the nineteenth century without its toils and dangers. Perhaps Toynbee's 'barbarism' [the British historian who saw in the Appalachians an example of "people who have acquired civilization and then lost it"] is actually a preview of the twenty-first century, when the rich will be truly secure and the poor will not work, aspire or starve. Appalachia was the nation's first frontier. Now it may be foretelling America's final form.Washington Irving's 1839 idea has now awakened from its Rip Van Winkle sleep. Welcome to the United States of Appalachia. However you pronounce it.
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