native tongue

I’m not a dialects person, but I’ve chased down people who are and the general consensus of those ‘in the know’ seems to be that it’s the Appalachian tongue that’s closest to Shakespeare’s own. That the mountains have served as an insulator and protected the mother tongue of their earliest immigrants.

In the days following the Civil War, travel writers returning from the nation’s newest state mocked its inhabitants as weird religious folk who prayed to mountains and still spoke Elizabethan English.

Speaking from personal experience, and this isn’t to do with dialect expressly but it goes to the same point, I’m amazed and excited at how often I hear my grandfather, a deep-wood, West Virginia fellow, as he’ll tell you himself, using words or phrases that are more relevant to The Bard’s time than our own.

You won’t find half of his words in a dictionary, but you WILL find them in the likes of Johnson, Raleigh, and Shakespeare. Of course.