The Language & Life Project
3 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2010–2014
8:11 · 8.4M views · Sep 12, 2008
An excerpt from the documentary Mountain Talk on Appalachian English. Residents of Southern Appalachia talk about their dialect and give examples of its distinctive words.
Cited as an example of a distinctive local dialect, with unfamiliar words and phrases.
3 comments from Hacker News
There's a few things worth responding to in your comment, some technical and non-technical, but both important for beginners to keep in mind. I assume you know most of what I'm going to say, so I'm pretending a student asked this. So, what's the problem with the <center> tag? First, at the purely technical level, <center> was deprecated in HTML4.01 and is not part of HTML5 at all. As far as I know browsers will still render it fine, but it's technically not valid HTML5. Second, <center> was deprecated along with other tags like <font>, <blink>, <big>, and <strike> because of a popular movement in the late 90s to encapsulate the logical and semantic structure of the document in HTML and the display structure in CSS. So, there's a case to me made for not using it as a Best Practice™, irrespective of the technical details about what browsers do or don't do, whether it's deprecated or not, etc. Third, other people take your code as a reflection of what was going on inside your head when you wrote it. Your HTML and other code exists in a cultural milieu whether you like it or not. Potential employers will certainly read these sorts of things into your code, so if you care about that then you should care about what they'll think when they see you using the <center> tag. In sociolinguistics there's an idea of the "prestige" of a dialect. For example, in the US, someone speaking Received Pronunciation ( [LINK] ) will be perceived as more educated and worldly while something speaking
There is, lots of ski resorts, hiking, that sort of thing. The kicker is that those same places will actually hire in lots of Europeans to work the facilities, so not only are the employees not local, they aren't even from the same country! It's a shame, there's a kernel of some great culture there, a unique dialect, great music, entertaining local history and color, some beautiful folk art. Local dialect this video The traditional music is a descendant of Celtic folk music, but unique enough to be interesting. Here's a fantastic documentary on the music [LINK] All it would really take would be for some kind of Appalachian Music to become wildly popular and I could see the region getting popular music centers people would come to visit. Their main possible export market is all cultural.
Well those weren't exhaustive examples, but I'd still disagree - for the longest time, I though "hoagie" was a polish food (I grew up in "grinder" territory) and I was mystified the first time someone asked me to pick up an "orange coke" at the drug store. Another example: this video it's all English, and you can often get a general meaning from context, but the vid gives examples of words I've never heard, or more familiar English words used in combinations that obscure the meaning. So of course you can take someone from the video and drop them in NYC and they'll be able to function, but there will likely be things they miss and things NYCers will miss talking to them. Now in a school environment, that can make a huge distance.