Abstract
There were three major purposes of this research: (1) to determine the linguistic structure of the Appalachian region in terms of functional vocabulary, misused words, colloquial terms and corrected functional vocabulary; an overall list of misused words, their corrected forms, colloquial terms and their explanations were developed; (2) to determine the relationship between education, urban contact and media contact and functional vocabulary, misused words, colloquial terms and corrected functional vocabulary; and (3) to determine the relationship of age, sex and income to functional vocabulary, misused words, colloquial terms and corrected functional vocabulary.
An analysis of 117 hours of spoken discourse, or 471,656 words, revealed that rustic speakers have a smaller functional vocabulary than modern and cultured speakers, and modern speakers have a smaller vocabulary than cultured speakers in six states. The variations in average functional vocabulary were greatest among rustic and least for cultured speakers.
The data supports the hypothesis that rustic speakers misuse more words than modem speakers and modern speakers misuse more words than cultured speakers.
The corrected functional vocabulary increases with an increase in the degree of an individual's linguistic sophistication. An overall variation of 19.4 percent of Appalachian English from the “standard English” leads us to believe that there is a distinct pattern or linguistic structure throughout the Appalachian region.