9 Things Virginians Say That Place Them East or West of the Blue Ridge

Virginia Tech’s Southwest Virginia Language Project spent this year studying how Virginians say one word—Appalachia—using recordings a podcast called Appodlachia collected from listeners across 13 states.

The split follows the mountains.

These are the things Virginians say that place them east or west of the Blue Ridge.

1. Poke

In Virginia’s westernmost counties, beyond the Blue Ridge, a trip to the grocery store can still end with a poke instead of a bag.

Poke is one of nearly 300 words the Dictionary of American Regional English, or DARE, ties to Southern Appalachian speech.

That list is one Virginia’s coalfield counties share with the rest of the mountain South.

West Virginia University’s dialect researchers still quiz students on the word for that reason.

Not a sack.

A shopper in Wise County or Marion can still ask for a poke without a second thought.

Cross into the Piedmont or Tidewater, and that mountain vocabulary thins out fast.

2. Holler

Holler is what many people west of the Blue Ridge call the dip between two ridges, not a valley.

Dictionaries treat it as a dialect spelling of “hollow,” labeled South Midland and Southern U.S., an Americanism that goes back to the 1830s.

The word still shows up in place names across Southwest Virginia and the counties near the West Virginia line.

East of the ridge, people say valley.

Holler barely registers there.

Two words describe the same dip in the land.

Which word a person reaches for still depends on which side of the mountains they grew up on.

3. You’uns

You’uns is how many Virginians west of the Blue Ridge address a group of people, a shortened “you ones” that dictionaries trace back to the early 1800s.

Dictionary.com labels it nonstandard Midland U.S., the same word family that spread across Appalachia’s mountain counties, Southwest Virginia included.

Not everybody uses it.

Many people in the mountains still say y’all right alongside it.

Cross into the Piedmont or Tidewater, and you’uns disappears.

A Bristol grandmother might greet a group with “you’uns.”

A Virginia Beach grandmother never would.

4. A-Goin’

People west of the Blue Ridge sometimes tack an extra “a-” onto the front of a verb.

Going to town becomes a-goin’ to town.

Fixing supper becomes a-fixin’ supper, especially from an older relative.

Linguists call it a-prefixing.

Yale’s Grammatical Diversity Project traces the pattern through the Appalachian counties that run from Alabama and West Virginia into Virginia’s mountains.

It rarely crosses east of the ridge.

A Richmond or Norfolk speaker wouldn’t add that “a-” without sounding like they were doing an impression.

5. Might Could

“Might could” is the double modal many speakers west of the Blue Ridge reach for.

They stack two modal verbs into one phrase, as in “I might could get there by five.”

Linguists call this a double modal.

Yale’s Grammatical Diversity Project traces the construction across the South and South Midland, including the West Virginia and North Carolina counties that border Virginia’s mountains.

East of the ridge, a Virginian picks one modal and stops.

Not the doubled-up version.

In Richmond, that same sentence stops at one modal: I might get there by five.

The doubled-up version is far more common in Virginia’s mountain counties than anywhere else in the state.

6. Own for On

Southwest Virginia stretches its vowels longer than the rest of the state.

A 2025 Axios feature quoted Virginia Tech linguistics professor Abby Walker on the clearest example: The porch light isn't "on." It's "own."

Walker names Tidewater and Appalachian as two of the state's accents, the first heard along the coast, the second in the southwest.

Not east of the mountains.

Someone in Roanoke or Abingdon can say "own" for "on" without a second look.

The same swap in Fairfax gets a raised eyebrow.

7. Richmond Drawl

East of the Blue Ridge, Richmond has a vowel pattern the rest of the state doesn't share.

The same 2025 Axios feature that quoted Abby Walker on Southwest Virginia's vowels calls the Richmond pattern O-fronting.

Richmonders round words like boat, goat, home, and no toward the front of the mouth, stretch time toward a long tahm sound, and drop the g off -ing words.

Even Walker says there hasn't been much formal research on Richmond's accent, unlike the research behind Southwest Virginia's.

West of the mountains, those same words keep their standard shape.

A Richmonder headed to a cookout is "goin'."

A Roanoke native headed the same way is "going."

Small difference.

A linguist can hear it across a room.

8. Dropping the R

Virginia's Tidewater region carries a documented history of dropping the r at the end of a word, so "more" comes out closer to "moah" and "car" closer to "cah."

The r disappears.

The Public Broadcasting Service's Do You Speak American? project traces that pattern to the earliest-settled coastal areas of the country, which it says were "heavily represented" by r-dropping settlers from southeastern England.

West of the mountains, the pattern runs the opposite way.

Scots-Irish and German families pushed into the uplands instead of settling the coast.

PBS notes that those settlers kept every r sound instead of dropping it.

That pattern has held in the mountains long after coastal speech began to change.

A Virginian's r still hints at which side of the mountains raised them.

9. Saying Appalachia

Appalachia is the word at the center of Virginia Tech's Southwest Virginia Language Project, run by linguists Abby Walker and Charlie Farrington.

The project grew out of Appodlachia, a podcast whose host, Chuck Corra, asked listeners across the Appalachian region to record themselves saying the word.

He collected more than 1,500 submissions spanning 423 counties across 13 states, stretching from New York to northern Mississippi.

Walker's team at Virginia Tech pored over what came back.

Across that whole multistate stretch, people in the northern and southern parts of the region tended to say app-uh-lay-shuh, while people in the middle favored app-uh-latch-uh.

Southwest Virginia sits in that middle band.

Its answer came back app-uh-latch-uh.

East of the mountains, where the region barely registers as home turf, app-uh-lay-shuh is the more familiar sound.

In Wise County, saying it the other way gives you away fast.