The Speech of the Shenandoah Valley

T HE STATE of Virginia, like its neighbor Tennessee and like Caesar's Gaul, is divided into three parts. The divisions are primarily geographical, but in this time of easy communication and transportation, the distinctions among the three parts are mainly social; by and large, of course, there is a great deal of overlapping of social strata. Tidewater or Eastern Virginia is, generally speaking, the proud land, the first home of the adventurous gentlemen who brought with them the spirit of English cavaliers. A Tidewater Virginian of the better class quickly mentions his birthplace, lest he be mistaken for a Piedmont or Valley Virginian. Middle Virginia is the Piedmont region, only a little less aristocratic in attitude than Eastern Virginia. The bourgeois' part of the state is in the long, beautiful valley between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghany Mountains, known as the Shenandoah Valley. It includes the counties of Augusta, Rockingham, Shenandoah, Page, Warren, Frederick, and Clark. Much has been written about Virginia speech, often regarded as typically southern.2 It is common knowledge, for example, that the broad [a] in aunt, calf, draft, glass, path, dance, etc., persists in Eastern Virginia,3 that palatalization sometimes occurs in words like garden, card, and car, and that the diphthong [au] appears as [av]4 and [xeu] and even [Eu]. As early as 1774 a traveler noted that the people near Richmond pronounced shower as sho-er and that they spoke of a frolicsome horse as

Geography · Linguistics · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy

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