The goal of this project is to create an online corpus of one million words of traditional Appalachian speech, which will be freely available to the scholarly community and to the public. Though often socially stigmatized, Appalachian English is historically central to the development of American English from its British origins, and the project aims to provide a resource unprecedented in scope and in public accessibility for cultural, historical, and linguistic research on the English of Appalachia.
The project is based on an existing collection of recordings and transcripts by Prof. Michael Montgomery, a recognized authority in the field, and its goals include digitizing the recordings, aligning the digitized sound files with the transcripts, and annotating the transcripts with detailed grammatical information. Digitizing the recordings will preserve this valuable cultural resource for future generations, and aligning the digitized recordings with the transcripts will allow researchers to rapidly find recorded words and phrases by searching the transcribed text. The grammatical annotation will allow in-depth analyses of particular constructions that are specific to Appalachian English or typical of vernacular American speech more generally, as well as comparisons of Appalachian English with contemporary standard American English, with other vernacular Englishes, and with earlier stages of the language.
Because the corpus will be large, publicly available, and searchable online with standard computational tools, it will foster replicability, thereby contributing to increased empirical rigor in linguistic research. These same properties will also make it possible to use the corpus as a teaching tool at the high school and college levels. It will also serve as a model for the creation of similar corpora of other varieties of English. In sum, the annotated corpus of Appalachian English will deepen our understanding of America's linguistic heritage and promote a scientifically informed appreciation of regional language and culture.
