Appalachian English and the Wheelbarrow

What does Appalachian English have to do with a wheelbarrow?

*Charles Napier Hemy, Telling the Bees*
*Wikimedia Commons*

A person’s accent has a lot to do with the way they pronounce words, but sometimes a person consistently says a word the way it isn’t meant to be said no matter what accent they have. They are saying the wrong word and don’t even realize it.

My husband and I are currently watching all the episodes of Midsomer Murders. I am constantly learning new things by watching this British detective drama, and it does bring back memories from when we lived in England. In “The Killings at Badger’s Drift,” the very first episode, I learned that it was customary for bee owners to tell the bees when a member of the family died. After watching the below episode, we were hooked.

Towards the end of December, we finally got to season 10, episode 7. This particular episode was titled “They Seek Him Here.” The term barrow boy was said. Neither one of us knew what a barrow boy was, so I paused the show and looked it up. Like me, my husband likes to find out the meaning of any unfamiliar words he runs across, and with dictionaries so easy to access on the internet, there isn’t any excuse to not look them up.

According to dictionary.com, a barrow boy is a British term that means a man (or boy) who sells his wares from a barrow, a cart with a shallow box body, two wheels, and shafts for pushing it. In other words, he is a street vendor.

Then something clicked with my husband. “So it’s a wheelbarrow, not a wheelbarrel!”

I will admit that I burst into laughter. Apparently, all of his life he had heard the small usually single-wheeled vehicle that is used for carrying small loads and fitted with handles at the rear by which it can be pushed and guided called a wheelbarrel. And I, someone who knew better, had never even noticed him saying it wrong. That was more than a bit embarrassing for me since I am an editor. Although it did console me a bit when I realized that I had never seen him write that specific word but had only heard him speak it. I’ve also discovered that my husband isn’t the only person who used that term. The other ones I know who say it this way are also from the Appalachian area, so could that possibly be a common mispronunciation? Are wheelbarrow and wheelbarrel—which is not a word—also commonly confused words outside of this region?

The people I know who wrongly called a wheelbarrow a wheelbarrel are not stupid; they are actually very intelligent. Contrary to popular belief, hillbillies are not stupid. There are approximately the same number of stupid people in the Appalachian region of the United States as in any other area of this nation.

Could it have been because of our accents that I didn’t notice? My husband and I both grew up in Kentucky counties that are part of the Appalachian area. Everyone—family members, teachers, friends, etc.—spoke with an Appalachian accent. Over the years, this accent has softened a bit in certain areas but not so much in others. And this accent is even more pronounced where we live now than it was where we grew up.

Where did this accent originate from? I’ve heard many different theories, but that one that’s most believable to me is that Appalachian English is a remnant of Elizabethan English. Why does that one make sense to me? My husband was in the U. S. Air Force for several years, and that would explain something that happened when we first arrived in England: many of his coworkers thought I was British until we told them otherwise. Could that have been because of my accent?

And when the man in the below video reads Shakespeare with a hillbilly accent, it sounds so natural.