Not from around here: Migration and Hillbilly Elegy
By Sarah Dugan, Ph.D. CCC-SLP and Kirk Hazen, Ph.D.
In late November, Ron Howard’s adaptation of J. D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” was released on Netflix. The film is already receiving some of the same criticism leveled at the memoir, such as being a form of poverty porn in which people in struggling circumstances are used to generate feelings of superiority or sympathy in the audience.
Some of these critiques are leveled at author J. D. Vance’s outsider status: he is “a venture capitalist not from Appalachia”. This is geographically true: Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, which is not in the Appalachian region. Vance’s grandparents were Appalachian migrants, part of a group of seventy million people who migrated north from the Appalachian region after World War II in search of jobs ([1], [2]). These migrants often settled in enclaves of other Appalachian migrants in large cities, where they remained for years ([3]). These migrant communities could be found in Columbus and Dayton in Ohio, for example, or in Ypsilanti and Detroit in Michigan. The evidence of Appalachian communities within a city can be seen in the creative use of the affix “-tucky” (from the state of “Kentucky”) as a portmanteau with the larger city’s name: “Ypsitucky” and “Middletucky” (a word Vance uses) refer to the visible presence of Appalachian migrants in their new home cities.
Sociolinguists look at dialect change as a measure of change in social affiliations, and the post-war Appalachian migration has provided many opportunities to study the migrants’ social attitudes. When migrants preserve parts of their native dialect, that preservation is largely due to a strong feeling of solidarity with others who have that dialect. However, dialect preservation can also be due to reduced opportunities to interact with others from outside the migrant community. You can imagine a situation where you work, worship, shop, and socialize with the same small group of people (we can probably relate to this quite well during the COVID-19 pandemic). After living for years in a tightknit group, you are less likely to be linguistically in touch with the latest trends and currents of language change; you may be more likely to hold on to older slang terms (“YOLO” or “fam”, for example) than others who have had frequent contact with people from other communities.
In “Hillbilly Elegy,” Vance illustrates his community’s isolation in the moment he realized his Appalachian family had a different dialect (or “accent”, as he calls it). This vivid portrayal of courtroom scene in Middletown takes place after his mother had been arrested and charged with domestic violence:
The moms and dads and grandparents didn’t wear suits like the lawyers and judge. They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed “TV accents” — the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. The people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.
Vance uses the words “TV accent” and “neutral” to illustrate the reality that his family’s dialect is anything but socially “neutral”. Middle and upper-class people stigmatize speech associated with the lower economic classes, including Appalachian dialects. The act of speaking with an Appalachian dialect in the court will immediately invoke negative stereotypes about a person’s intelligence and culture. For the future lawyer Vance, this memory must have been very important, as he is now one of those “people who ran the courthouse”. Later, when he attends Yale Law School, Vance is acutely aware of his dialect differences, but he now identifies with those differences, writing, “I reveled in the fact that I was the only big marine with a Southern twang at my elite law school.”
Vance’s identification with Appalachian-associated speech and region has roots in the Appalachian experience. Many post-war Appalachian migrants, like Vance’s grandparents, have been reversing their migration in the past few decades, returning to their Appalachian homes for retirement. Scholars (like us) have been interested in understanding whether migrants’ speech has been changed by their time in the northern cities. When we look at Appalachian migrants’ conversations with family and friends, what we find is a complex picture: while some aspects of their dialect were not preserved, overall, former migrants use certain Appalachian dialect features more frequently when compared to family members who had never left their Appalachian home ([4]). A former migrant would have more instances of “was-leveling” (“We was in high school”) or “demonstrative them” (“All them young ladies”) in their speech than non-migrants. In other words, a migrant’s speech may sound more “Appalachian” in some ways than someone who stayed in Appalachia, especially if that migrant had few interactions outside the Appalachian migrant community.
Given that Appalachian dialects are stigmatized, why would a migrant use more Appalachian dialect features than a person who never left Appalachia? In Northern cities, if someone has a “Mamaw,” using that name is a mark of otherness in many circles. If someone says, “We was working all day,” they are often considered less intelligent.
Sociolinguists argue that our speech reflects our affiliations and identity. In the case of Appalachian migrants, many migrants felt a strong affiliation with their Appalachian roots — and their time in new cities only strengthened that connection. Their increased use of Appalachian dialect features is a record of their positive regard for home and family. For Vance, his “Southern twang” at Yale was a demonstration of pride in his roots.
We know from studying speech that the Appalachian region is diverse, vibrant, and beloved by those who have lived there — just like other American regions. Yet for years, persistent stereotypes have silenced the personal stories of Appalachian people. Popular media portrays Appalachia as an isolated and unchanging region, and Vance’s writing is often burdened with these stereotypes. But Appalachian dialects have been changing over decades, just like other American dialects. That change happens because speakers interact with new people, the needs of speakers change, and young people create new ways to say things. People change and language changes with them.
It is time we recognize that change and amplify the diversity of Appalachian voices in our media.
[1] Evans, Betsy. 2004. The role of social network in the acquisition of local dialect norms by Appalachian migrants in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Language Variation and Change 16. 153–167.
[2] Evans, Betsy, Rika Ito, Jamila Jones & Dennis Preston. 2006. How to get to be one kind of Midwesterner: Accommodation to the Northern Cities Chain Shift. In Thomas E. Murray and Beth Lee Simon (eds.), Language variation and change in the American Midland. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 179–197.
[3] Kahn, Kathy. 1973. Hillbilly women. New York: Doubleday.
[4] Hazen, Kirk & Hamilton, Sarah. 2008. A Dialect Turned Inside Out: Migration and the Appalachian Diaspora. Journal of English Linguistics. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0075424208317127
