Stil Talkin’ Like a Mountaineer
Here are a few more quirks of the West Virginia dialect which I learned from relatives. Like I said last week, these may be found in more areas than just West Virginia. And not all West Virginians may talk this way. West Virginia is a crossroads. Not North, or South, or West, or East, the state contains a little bit of all those regions.
“push” and “bush” are pronounced “poosh” and “boosh”
“dish” and “fish” are pronounced “deesh” and “feesh”
“wash” and “gosh” are pronounced “warsh” and “garsh”
Words ending in “ow”, making an long “o” sound, are pronounced “er”. For example, “follow”, “hollow”, and “yellow” are pronounced “feller”, “holler”, and “yeller”.
I find myself using “be” and a verb ending in “ing” when a present tense verb works just as well. For example, if my kids are doing something they shouldn’t, I don’t say, “You can’t do that!” I say, “You can’t be doing that!”
When writing my novel, I had a hard time choosing between whether my characters would use “y’all” or “y’uns” for the plural form of “you”. My grandparents used “y’uns” and they were from the northern part of the state. I have friends who lived around Charleston and they use “y’all”. My setting is north and east of Charleston but south of my grandparents’s hometown.
In the end, I decided to use “y’uns”. When anyone reads “y’all”, the reader knows the setting is the American South. Since West Virginia and the Appalachian Mountains are different from the South, I thought “y’uns” would signal that difference and my characters’ rural background.
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