[mikelevins]

Of course the dialects are not so densely distributed in North America, and English has only been evolving in the Americas for a few hundred years, but there are a bunch of dialects, and I find them super interesting.

My paternal grandparents were honest-to-goodness Ozark hillbillies who spoke Ozark Midlands (also called South Midlands), which is very close to, and sometimes conflated with, Appalachian English.

I'm in the Ozarks now and at least in the region where I live, this dialect seems to be disappearing. I still hear traces of it, but I don't think I've heard anyone really speaking it in years.

That's too bad. I love that dialect--perhaps because it was the language that my grandparents spoke.

If you're curious about it, you could listen to some of Terry Gross' interview with Ralph Stanley. He spoke Appalachian English, but it's indistinguishable to my ear from the language my grandparents spoke.

Here's the interview at NPR:

https://www.npr.org/2016/06/24/483428938/bluegrass-legend-ra...