In the course of my frantic search for the truths of colloquial American English, I’ve come across some unexpected aspects of the language. Since artificial intelligence seems to take great pleasure in messing with me, I signed up for some academic websites to get more reliable insights into the topic. Much to my surprise, what began with the seemingly simple contrast between "Give me that" and "Give that to me" led me down a rabbit hole of dative constructions.

But what surprised me most was learning about the existence of an English variety I'd never heard of before: Appalachian English. It wasn’t because of the particular arrangement of its structures, but rather because of how much it reminds me of Spanish. Yes, we say “I’m gonna buy me a fishing rod, just as long as I am tall” — and that wouldn’t be a colloquialism at all, but standard Spanish.

So Appalachian English shares quite a few features with my native language (a Romance language), even though this dialect derives from the speech of settlers from the British Isles. Everyone knows about the Mayflower, but other British groups came earlier, and Spaniards were there before them, and Vikings even before that — or so history says, though I don’t fully buy it. Historians tend to spin things in their own favor/ tend to tilt the story in their favor/  tend to feather their own nests.

Anyway, another peculiar characteristic of Appalachian English is that it retains the Welsh English tendency to pronounce words beginning with the letter “h” as if it were silent (e.g., “humble” as “umble”) — just like we do in Spanish. Yes, we say “ola” instead of “hola.” Let’s illustrate the resemblance between Appalachian English and Spanish with some examples:

"I’ve only got me one pair of socks left, and they smell of cheese."

"Solo me queda un par de calcetines y huelen a queso."

Their similarities are pretty obvious. So here's my advice: learn Appalachian English. It’s a dead ringer for the Spanish language that will give you the key to speaking like a native in no time.

Works cited:

Rumpelstiltskin, Jeremiah. “Dative Shenanigans and Stuff" University of East Marlborough Linguistics Review, vol. 12, no. 4, 2022, pp. 77–93.