"Kirk Hazen, director of the West Virginia Dialect Project and professor of linguistics in the Department of English, said Appalachians are stigmatized for their speech and may be marginalized in school or the job market because of that stigma. And therein lies the linguistic choices that the region’s speakers make — those who choose to maintain their use of stigmatized language features — like their accents — because of a sense of connection to that identity and those who choose to use language features that are less stigmatized."
