About 1,500 people recorded themselves — and their Appalachian accents — in an effort to create a snapshot of how the region’s name is pronounced.
Chuck Corra, who runs the Appodlachia podcast and newsletter, collected submissions from 408 different counties within the area as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission, an economic development partnership among 13 states and the federal government. ARC’s boundaries encompass 423 counties across the region.
“Any political issue we've ever touched on the show, the ire that it has induced has paled in comparison to people's opinions — fiery, bloodthirsty opinions — on how to pronounce it,” Corra said about the word “Appalachia.”
Corra and John Isner started the podcast at the end of 2019 after the two worked on the latter’s West Virginia statehouse campaign. The ideas Appodlachia has explored for the past several years grew out of issues they’d found worthy to highlight during that campaign — as well as topics that would resonate across the region.
Broadly, the work, Corra said, is intended to dispel myths about Appalachian people.
The West Virginia native said the region’s outer boundaries — up in New York state and down to Mississippi — included more diversity in pronunciation, though 87% of people said “latch” as opposed to 9.2% who said “lay” in their submissions.
“I think that number largely tracks, at least from what I have witnessed,” Corra said.
There were wrinkles in the data, though: Some mixed the two when saying “Appalachia” and “Appalachian.”
Members of Virginia Tech’s Speech Lab contacted Appodlachia after seeing Instagram videos detailing the sample Corra built, hoping to use it for research. Neither Corra nor the Tech researchers were aware of a similar collection of recordings.
The different perspectives expressed in those submissions are why Corra wanted to work on the project in the first place.
“So many people view Appalachia in a very one-dimensional way,” he said. “They see it as not a diverse region — a very singular way of viewing it — when in reality, it's a 13-state region that stretches clear from the cusp of the Mississippi Delta up to Western New York. So, there's a lot of diversity in geographic, ethnic, political everything.”
Charlie Farrington is a sociolinguist and Virginia Tech professor who worked with the recordings and helped create data visualizations based on the submissions. While the recordings represent a single point in time, they were sent by people of different ages living in different locations and represented various socio-economic backgrounds.
“I think in a few years if we collected more data, we might see more ‘Appalatchian’ being used, especially in that northern area, where there is a little bit more variability,” Farrington said. “I would be more interested in collecting data around the periphery a little bit more.”
Corra’s planning at least one more post connected to the project, delving into the Apalachee tribe — which mainly lived in Florida, but is a clear reference point for where current pronunciations came from.
He might consider updating the survey in the future, in part to continue to dispel myths around the region.
“I wanted to show people that the Appalachian accent is diverse and it's something that should be celebrated, not denigrated,” Corra said. “We heard a lot from people over the years when we started talking about accents, they appreciated us viewing them in a positive light because they were always told to suppress or get rid of their accent or try to hide it because they wouldn't be taken seriously in settings outside of Appalachia … . We wanted to try to do our small part to change that and destigmatize it.”