Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 March 2007
Neal Hutcheson (producer and director). Mountain talk. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Language and Life Project, 2003. DVD $20.
Twenty years ago, I met many of my grandmother's fifty-odd cousins for the first time. Born in Panther Hollow, North Carolina (pronounced “Painter Holler”), my grandmother moved to the nearest town, Asheville, when she was a child. On the occasion of her seventieth birthday, many of the cousins she left behind came down out of the mountains to celebrate with her. A few of them spoke in a unique dialect, a “brogue” riddled with odd turns of phrase and vocabulary.