Celtic Influences on Appalachian Speech

As someone with an interest in languages and language history, I have been studying languages for many years. I have also been collecting examples of `regionalisms' -- idioms or manners of speech that seem to be local to a particular part of the country. Recently, I realized these paths were coming together in the connection between Celtic languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic and the idioms of the southern Appalachian region.

Before I go on, I want to make one thing very clear. I think accents, regionalisms, and other aspects of the diversity of language are wonderful things. (More on this later.) I'm certainly not trying to make fun of the way anybody talks. I have friends and relatives with Boston accents, German accents, Midwestern accents, and of course Southern accents, and I think they're all worth treasuring.

Now I'd like to share with you some of these observations. Or, in the "vernacular":

In this hyear story, I'm a-fixing to tell you a slew of tings about Appalachee talk.

Let's look at this quote a little more closely. First of all, many people don't know how many words in English actually have origins in Irish or Scottish Gaelic. (I'll give examples of both at times, but if I tend to prefer Irish it is only because I am more confident with it.) "Slew," for example, comes from the Irish slua or sluagh, meaning `host, army, crowd.' Here are lots of others.

But having words passed down to us from other languages is certainly not surprising. Beyond its own "Germanic" language heritage, English has borrowed words from countless other languages, and so it is hard to imagine not finding words of Celtic origin. Besides, few of these words really have a regional character at this point. Most of them have come to us through our British English heritage. However, there are a number of other coincidences that are even more striking.

Let's look more closely at some other Celtic aspects that show up in this sample sentence. Take the accent, for instance. The `h' sound does not stand by itself in Gaelic, but the `hy' sound that enters into words like "here" is very similar to the sound at the beginning of a word such as cheil. Likewise, there is no `th' sound in Gaelic as is often heard in "this" or "think." So a Gaelic accent might make "things" sound like "tings," because the `t' is the closest familiar sound to a Gaelic speaker.

Whether the form of the word "Appalachee" is from a Native American root or from a Celtic root is hard do say. But the words for most groups of people in Irish happen to end in í (pronounced `ee') because this is a common form of the plural.

How about "a-fixing"? It turns out this isn't a simple matter of an accent. In Gaelic, sentences like this one (the "present progressive") are constructed with a particle ag and a form of the verb known as the verbal noun. Ag is almost always pronounced as just `uh' (the "schwa" sound). From this we get phrases like "a-going" (ag dul). Furthermore, this is a common way of expressing the simple present tense in Gaelic. So, "I am wanting" is very much a Gaelic, and Southern Appalachian, way to say "I want." Why "I'm a-fixing" instead of "I'm a going"? Because in Gaelic, intention to do something is expressed with the word dean, which means "to do," "to make," or sometimes, "to fix."

Even the use of "talk" rather than "speech" to refer to the a way of speaking may be influenced by Gaelic. For example, in the Southeast, you are much more likely to hear someone say "plain talk" than "plain speech," even though the reverse is true in the Northeast. But in Gaelic, the word for both the verb "to talk" and the noun "speech" is caint.

Here are some other expressions that are probably influenced by the Celtic immigrants to this area:

"That's the guy what was walking down the street."

In Gaelic, there is one relative particle, a, which does not distinguish between "who," "what," and "which."

"Myself and John are going."

The word féin, though often translated as "self", is used much more broadly in Gaelic than in many dialects of English.

"Tis I who saw ..."

The relative construction is commonly used in Gaelic to vary sentence order, giving Is mise a chonaic ... rather than Chonaic mé

"in your face"

This idiom happens to literally translate the Scots Gaelic nad aghaidh.

"He kisses on me," and "She pets on the cat," rather than "kisses me" and "pets the cat".

In Gaelic, you put a kiss or a pet on something (cur pog ar).

In a similar vein, "He put the scare on them."

Emotions are almost always "on" a person in Gaelic (Tá bron orm translates literally to "I have sadness on me"), so it makes sense that someone put them there.

"Who with?" rather than "With whom?"

There is "no object version of interrogative pronouns" in Gaelic, and question words almost always begin sentences. So you just have to say "Who with?"

"There is not but one."

There is no world for "only" in Gaelic, and this idiom is the normal way of saying "There is only one."