Blog 2: Ain't No Mistake (or, Chancy/Chauncy)

Things I've Heard at the Athens, Ohio Walmart:

...We've only got about tin more minutes 'fore the car's ready...

...My kids really injoyed that book...

...Now don't you'ns start crying 'cause we ain't getting that game...

...He let on like he didn't want none!...

...Don't git any of them beans you gotta hull out...

...You don't need no more clothes. All the ones you got at home needs worshed...

...We got to laughin' so hard...

...Whenever I heard watermelon was on sale, I came in to get some...

...Well, you go on down past Chancy....

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The Hills

I still remember the time a middle school teacher asked me if I'd been born in a barn.


She asked me this because I'd used the word "you'ns."


Because of course, "you'ns" ain't a word. Ain't ain't a word, neither.  Our teachers made an earnest mission out of scrubbing clean our Southeast Ohio speech.

It wasn't until I was in college that I started looking into the history of Southeast Ohio language, and Appalachian dialects as a whole. What I found instead of wrongness was an alternate dialect history, one with roots in Scotland, Ireland, and the American pioneers. An excerpt from the documentary Mountain Talk explains:

According to linguist Michael Montgomery, the author of "How Scotch-Irish Is Your English?," much of what is considered to be "Appalachian" English is in fact an outgrowth of Scotch-Irish dialect, brought to the mountains by early settlers.

Cottage in the Scottish Highlands

Cabin in the Appalachian Mountains

This also explains the famous Chancy/Chauncy debate. Despite the popular belief (that the "locals" refer to our neighboring town as Chancy simply to weed out unsuspecting outsiders, who of course say Ch-awwn-sy), this pronunciation has a lot more to do with ancestral language than modern cattiness. 

Still, with such a long history of mistrust and miscommunication, it still seems like there's a long way to go to achieve cultural understanding between OU's students and the rest of Athens County. One of my former students discovered this when interviewing his dorm mates: 

Works Cited

Montgomery, Michael. “How Scotch-Irish is your English? The Ulster Heritage of East Tennessee Speech.” The Ulster-Scots Language Society. 30 July 2010 < http://www. ulsterscotslanguage.com/en/texts/scotch-irish/how-scotch-irish-is-your-english/>.

Mountain Talk. Dir. Neal Hutcheson. NCLLP Films, 2004.

Rybka, Steve. "What Do OU Students Think of Appalachia?" YouTube. 21 Feb. 2011.