The Archive of Traditional Appalachian Speech (ATAS) is a long-range project to compile in two formats (text and audio) a one-million-word corpus of vernacular speech recorded in the 1970's and 1980's from seven areas of Appalachia, in six states including southern West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Southwest Virginia, East Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and northeast Georgia. This award will support completion of the first comprehensive stage of ATAS. Approximately 280,000 words from fifty native speakers recorded in four of the seven areas will be transcribed, re-audited, and proofed to ensure optimal reliability and conformity to conventions standard in the field of corpus linguistics. Transcriptions and associated historical information will be mounted on websites maintained at the University of South Carolina and at East Tennessee State University.
The resulting searchable electronic corpus will be an invaluable resource for local and family historians, linguists, folklorists, and other scholars. ATAS will be the largest bank of easily and publicly accessible conversational data for any regional or social variety of American English. The transcribed recordings will represent a comprehensive resource on the diverse lifestyles, character and experiences of rural Appalachian Americans born around the turn of the twentieth century. This project will help dispel negative stereotypes of the region, and for those who live in Appalachia, it will be a valuable community asset documenting their speech and way of life.
