Dictionary

Gurney Norman used for some of the citations. “Kinfolks,” by Norman, is a collection of short stories rich in detail from life in southwest Virginia and eastern Kentucky.

In 1937, when the National Parks Service began considering turning the Smoky Mountains into a national park, it hired Hall, then a graduate student at Columbia University, to study the language of the residents, to preserve their folkways.

Since the residents would soon be removed from the land and their houses destroyed, the preservation intent of the project might have seemed a bit “slaunchwise” (“slanting, oblique”).

But Hall threw himself into the project, returning to research a doctoral thesis in 1939, and coming back again in 1940, 1941, 1949, 1953, 1956, 1959, 1962, 1967 and 1976. Using two different recording devices he cut 160 aluminum and acetate discs documenting speech and music of the area. The musical selections lay unnoticed in the Library of Congress for decades until the Great Smoky Mountains Association released a compilation that was nominated for a Grammy in 2013.

Hall published several books and a glossary on the region, and in 1990 was approached by Montgomery, who suggested putting together a full-scale dictionary. Hall agreed, but died in 1992. Montgomery produced the more limited “Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English” in 2004, but went immediately to work on the expanded version.

How did Hall and Montgomery get so many people to talk to them in a region that is famously insular and mistrustful of “flatlanders”? That’s a mystery, said Heinmiller, but she suggested that any group proud of its culture would want to see it documented by an interested observer.

By recording the language, and therefore the history of the area, Hall and Montgomery went a long way toward overcoming years of mythmaking that have colored the conventional image of the Appalachian people.

There is the “noble savage” trope — which characterizes the residents as prone to bust out in poetry, a la Byron Herbert Reece, or gunfire, a la the Hatfields and Mccoys.

There is the Brigadoon scenario that has some small hamlets speaking in language identical to that of Shakespeare or Chaucer. (Still not true, said Heinmiller.) And there is the ignoble savage typified by James Dickey’s characters in “Deliverance.”

The Appalachian mountains are neither a secluded Shangri-la nor a hellish backwater, said Heinmiller. “In reality we have I-26 and I-40 running through, and it’s as touristy as anywhere else.”

Another myth of the Appalachians is that it is populated only by white Europeans. Walker, the UK professor, invented the term Affrilachian, to make the point that people of color, including himself and his family, are part of the story of this region.

He was glad to see their language also represented in the dictionary. “I didn’t feel left out,” he said. “I heard my grand-people’s speech in these pages.”