As early as 1880, I believe, the State had come to rank with some of the New England States in the matter of literacy.
The folk-speech of the Ohio River country has many features in common with that of the eastern Middle States, while it received but little from the dignified eighteenth-century English of eastern Virginia.

There are distinct traces of the North-Irish in the idioms and in the peculiar pronunciations.

One finds also here and there a word from the "Pennsylvania Dutch," such as "waumus" for a loose jacket, from the German _wamms_, a doublet, and "smearcase" for cottage cheese, from the German _schmierkaese_.

The only French word left by the old _voyageurs_, so far as I now remember, is "cordelle," to tow a boat by a rope carried along the shore.
Substantially the same folk-speech exists wherever the Pennsylvania migration formed the main element of the primitive settlement.

I have heard the same dialect in the South Carolina uplands that one gets from a Posey County Hoosier, or rather that one used to get in the old days before the vandal school-master had reduced the vulgar tongue to the monotonous propriety of what we call good English.
In drawing some of the subordinate characters in this tale a little too baldly from the model, I fell into an error common to inexperienced writers.