English in Appalachia has received little empirical scholarly attention, despite being one of the United State's most widely-recognized vernaculars. Over the last eight years, Dr. Kirk Hazen and associates of the West Virginia Dialect Project have conducted 151 interviews with native Appalachians. From this subject pool the West Virginia Corpus of English in Appalachia (WVCEA) was created. This corpus of 67 speakers balanced by age, sex, and region will be used to develop a sociolinguistic baseline for English in Appalachia. The primary goal for the overall project is to conduct quantitative sociolinguistic analysis on English in West Virginia to determine its current status, including its regional affiliations, its relative degree of vernacularity, its sociolinguistic divisions, and current directions of change. Another goal of this proposal is to develop a clearer regional association for English in West Virginia. Native West Virginians consider the language in the northern half of West Virginia to be far different from language in the southern region, which is aligned more with Southern varieties. A solid foundation of sociolinguistic evidence is needed to explore these claims.
This project integrates research and education by advancing discovery and understanding for university students while at the same time promoting better language awareness for the general public and teachers in K-12 schools through Dialect Awareness Programs. This research will contribute to the public understanding of language diversity in American society, especially the role of Appalachia within that society.
