PINEVILLE, W.Va. (AP) - In a sparsely populated Appalachian county, the young couple is recounting how they met while a language researcher captures their story with a high-end audio recorder.
"She smiled at me, then I got shy," 20-year-old Pete Culicerto recalls of his first encounter with Ginger Smyth at Wyoming East High School.
The story itself is routine, but it's the underlying sounds researchers are most interested in.
West Virginia University linguist Kirk Hazen is among a wave of scholars seeking to put to rest "Beverly Hillbillies"-style myths and stigmas about Appalachia.
Three books in the past year and a fourth to be published soon challenge these century-old stereotypes by noting, among other points, Appalachian residents speak a variety of Englishes - and not a single monolithic dialect - and scorn for the region's speech is often based on outdated notions of how they talk.
In southwest Virginia, English professor Amy D. Clark has held summer workshops for 15 years to help rural teachers teach students to write effectively without shaming them about their speech. The same message runs through teaching units on dialect for schoolchildren in North Carolina and West Virginia.
"You're trying to get across the idea that all language varieties are legitimate. There's not one that's somehow damaged and then others that are just fine," Hazen said. "They're all just fine."
The first step in changing perceptions of mountain speech is documenting how contemporary Appalachian residents talk, which is why Hazen is interviewing Culicerto and Smyth. Discussion topics include friends, community, and how involved Wyoming County parents are in teens' love lives.
When Smyth says, "It depends," the latter half of the word sounds similar to "pin," an example of a merger of vowel sounds common in the southern part of the state.
Culicerto remarks that in their relationship, both sets of parents ask the couple out to meals, showing an example of a redundant pronoun: "Both sides, they always ask."
The two examples are among enduring dialect features, which Hazen's research shows have remained steady in West Virginia.
Hazen, who's spent two decades conducting interviews around the state, has used his research to illustrate other stereotypical features of Appalachian speech have become rare - such as the demonstrative them ("them apples are the best") or a-prefixing ("I'm a-going to the store"). Neither was heard during the Pineville interviews.
Despite Hazen's research, many outsiders still have negative impressions about mountain accents, sometimes based on outdated speech features. It can take decades for perceptions to change.
The interview questions turn to how outsiders react to Smyth and Culicerto's accents.
"I think they look at me and they're like: "Oh my gosh, she lives way back in the holler ... and is so redneck!'" said Smyth, who's 17.
Increasingly, educators are seeking improve students' confidence and test scores with novel ways of teaching grammar.
Among them is contrastive analysis, an approach in which students diagram spoken sentences and compare them to formal written English. This and other methods are discussed at the Appalachian Writing Project's summer institute for teachers, led by Clark, the professor in Virginia.
Lizbeth Phillips, a middle-school teacher in southwest Virginia who's worked with Clark since 2004, assigns her students to keep journals of how adults in their community switch between formal and casual ways of speaking. Educators say the approach known as code- or style-switching allows students to preserve the way they speak at home and improve their writing without feeling ashamed.
"If you're marching out the red pen ... you're really criticizing their culture and their family heritage and other things. It's not just about standardizing the language," she said.
Some lovers of mountain culture see confidence starting to take root.
"There's a kind of re-appropriation of things "hillbilly,' which were once considered to be a negative stigma, and embracing it and turning that around into something positive. So people will say, "Yeah, I'm hillbilly, and proud of it!'" said Walt Wolfram, a linguist at North Carolina State University.
Last summer when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in East Tennessee canceled optional accent reduction classes after some employees complained, a newspaper headline hailed it as: "ORNL bows to Southern pride."
Culicerto, who made straight A's in high school and attends Marshall University, said stereotypes can run both ways - people where he's from sometimes look down at residents of big cities - but they're usually misguided.
"The way they look at us, we might look at them the same way, like: "Oh they have a city accent,'" he said. "But really, we're all the same."
Enduring and declining speech features in West Virginia
Below is a list of speech features studied by the West Virginia Dialect Project, some of which remain common and others that have become rare.
Led by linguist Kirk Hazen, the project's researchers have interviewed dozens of native speakers around the state over two decades and used audio software to analyze and catalog individual words and sounds. The research has allowed Hazen and his colleagues to write articles showing that some stereotypes of Appalachian speech are outdated.
Below are eight examples of what Hazen calls enduring and fading features of speech in the state.
FADING FEATURES
• The perfective "done": Used to show an action is complete ("I done walked the dog"), the perfective done has become rare in West Virginia. It has also been associated with other Southern states and England.
• "A"-prefixing: Once used with present-tense actions ("I'm a-going to the store"), this now-uncommon feature is still associated with mountain speech because of portrayals in movies and television.
• The demonstrative "them": The construction substitutes "them" for "these" or "those," ("them apples taste the best") Hazen's research indicates the demonstrative them - which has been found among English speakers around the world - has declined dramatically in West Virginia.
• For-to Infinitives: This occurs when speakers combine the preposition "for" with an infinitive verb, often in places where it could be left out ("Would you like for me to come with you?") Hazen's team says this feature is fading.
ENDURING FEATURES
• Pleonastic or redundant pronouns: This can be found when a speaker follows the subject of the sentence with a redundant pronoun ("My parents, they're really strict.") The use of these pronouns appears to be steady.
• The quotative "be like": The relatively new feature uses a form of the phrase "be like" to introduce a quote ("He was like, "I'm not going."') Researchers say it appears to have originated on the West Coast and come to West Virginia in recent decades.
• Consonant cluster reduction: This occurs when the sound of one consonant in a series, such as "t" or "d," is reduced. (For example, "bes' buddy" instead of "best buddy.") Used by young and old, the feature is likely to remain a part of West Virginia speech and can be found among English speakers around the world.
• Vowel mergers: Some speakers will use a single sound for vowels that are typically pronounced differently, such as those in "pin" and "pen," a common vowel merger in the South. Another example, involving the sounds in "cot" and "caught," appears to have started in Pennsylvania before spreading. Both types of vowel merger are increasing in West Virginia, the researchers say.
Source: Academic articles by West Virginia University professor Kirk Hazen and his colleagues