Appalachian English in southern Indiana? The evidence from verbal -s
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Abstract
In this paper, I analyze data from nonstandard subject-verb agreement with plural subjects (e.g., The stocks consists exclusively of wearing apparel..., since you was here...) as just one diagnostic to determine whether or not the dialect spoken in Harrison County, Indiana, located on the Ohio River in the extreme south-central part of the state, can reasonably be considered Appalachian English. At first sight, this question is surprising, to say the very least, since no definition of the Appalachian region includes any part of Indiana. However, many of the original white settlers in this area relocated here from various Appalachian states in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th centuries, and the patterning of plural verbal -s that persists here today bears striking similarities to the same in numerous dialects of Appalachian English (e.g., in Alabama (Feagin 1979), in Tennessee (Montgomery 1989), in West Virginia (Wolfram and Christian 1976; Christian, Wolfram, and Dube 1988)) as well as in Ozark English, a geographically-removed descendant of Appalachian English (Christian et al 1988, Hazen 1996). The Ozark region offers a unique point of comparison to Harrison County in that neither of these falls within the boundaries of Appalachia, yet they both share a linguistic connection to it, by means of their settlement histories. Therefore, any conclusions about dialect persistence in geographically removed but linguistically-related varieties based on a comparison of Appalachian English and Ozark English can only be strengthened to the extent that convincing similarities are also found in southern Indiana.
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