Michael Montgomery, editor of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, sent along this announcement about his web site. There’s some good stuff there.
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Dear All,
This is to announce the launching of a revised version of my website on the English language spoken in Appalachia, which has been created through the gracious assistance of my home department (English) at the University of South Carolina. At http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/ you will find a range of resources for experiencing and exploring the speech of the mountains from West Virginia to Alabama.
Whether you are a college teacher looking for material to develop a unit on Appalachian speech, a researcher in another field wanting to learn more about the subject, or just someone who likes to have the ears bathed in traditional speech from time to time, you will find plenty of interest here.
This site includes a half-dozen papers I have written for a lay readership and more than twenty audio segments from the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina that were recorded by my late colleague Joseph Sargent Hall in 1939. Each recording has an accompanying transcripts with many terms that are highlighted and lead to dictionary entries with pertinent historical information and further quotations. A comprehensive annotated bibliography of more than 600 items offers nearly endless opportunities for continuing study of the history, vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar, naming patterns and practices, use in literature, attitudes and perceptions, and other facets of the region’s English.
I would be proud for you to spend some time with this site and to pass this announcement along to anyone else who might have an interest in it. And of course I encourage suggestions for additions and improvements at any time (yes, I know that some of the links don’t work at the moment).
With best regards,
Michael Montgomery
Professor of English
University of South Carolina
