here is really little of it. A few words,
caigy (cadgy), coggled, fernent, gin for if, needcessity, trollop,
almost exhaust the list of distinct Scotticisms. The Scotch-Irish, as we
call them, were mainly Ulstermen, and the Ulster dialect of to-day bears
little analogy to that of Appalachia.

Scotch influence does appear, however, in one vital characteristic of
the pronunciation: with few exceptions our highlanders sound _r_
distinctly wherever it occurs, though they never trill it. In the
British Isles this constant sounding of _r_ in all positions is
peculiar, I think, to Scotland, Ireland, and a few small districts in
the northern border counties of England. With us it is general practice
outside of New England and those parts of the southern lowlands that had
no flood of Celtic immigration in the eighteenth century. I have never
heard a Carolina mountaineer say niggah or No'th Ca'lina, though in the
last word the syllable _ro_ is often elided.

In some mountain districts we hear do' (door), flo', mo', yo', co'te,
sca'ce (long _a_), pusson; but such skipping of the _r_ is common only
where lowland influence has crept in. Much oftener the _r_ is dropped
from dare, first, girl, horse, nurse, parcel, worth (dast, fust, gal,
hoss, nuss, passel, wuth). By way of compensation the hillsmen sometimes
insert a euphonic _r_ where it has no business; just as many New
Englanders say, "The idear of it!"

Throughout Appalachia such words as last, past, advantage, are
pronounced with the same vowel sound as is heard in man. This helps to
delimit the people, classifying them with Pennsylvanians and Westerners:
a linguistic grouping that will prove significant when we come to study
the origin and history of this isolated race.

An editor who had made one or two short trips into the mountains once
wrote me that he thought the average mountaineer's vocabulary did not
exceed three hundred words. This may be a natural inference if one
spends but a few weeks among these people and sees them only under the
prosaic conditions of workaday life. But gain their intimacy and you
shall find that even the illiterates among them have a range of
expression that is truly remarkable. I have myself taken down from the
lips of Carolina mountaineers some eight hundred dialectical or
obsolete words, to say nothing of the much greater number of standard
English terms that they command.

Seldom is a "hill-billy" at a loss for a word. Lacking other mea