Welcome to Fannin County, Georgia
 

Dialect of the Mountaineers of Southern Appalachia

The region we know as Appalachia is composed of eight contiguous states containing the Southern Appalachian Mountains. They were called hillsmen, hillbillies, mountaineers, and highlanders by the outsiders from the middle of the 18th through the first half of the 20th century. This treatment of the mountaineers' dialect will dwell mainly on Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Northern Georgia, including Fannin County, Georgia where part of my family (host of  Fannin County,site) still live and some of the older people still use the mountain dialect today.

For over two hundred years of the early history of the English colonies and later the United States, these people were isolated from the rest of the country and used a different language. This language was  pure English, it was a distinct dialect compared to the English spoken in other regions of the country. The dialect varied from one community to another and from family to family. Not everyone in an area used the dialect entirely. The people living farthest back in the mountains and having little contact with the outside world were the most consistent speakers of the dialect.