In a county beyond the reach of any four-lane highway, a young couple chuckles and swivels in their chairs as they start telling for posterity the story of how they met.

“You want me to tell the story, or you tell the story?” asks Pete Culicerto, 20, who’s seated next to his girlfriend before a pair of black microphones.

“I’ll tell it, because you’d make it all cheesy,” says 17-year-old Ginger Smyth, each of her syllables snaking through a black cable into a high-end audio recorder ticking the time off on a green digital screen.

“Cheesy’s good,” says West Virginia University linguist Kirk Hazen, encouraging a relaxed conversation that allows the accents and speech patterns of their mountain community to flow unhindered by the self-consciousness that sometimes keeps them in check.

Hazen, who’s spent two decades recording dozens of interviews around West Virginia, is among a new wave of scholars seeking to put to rest “Beverly Hillbillies”-style myths and stigmas about Appalachia.

Three books in the past year and a fourth to be published soon challenge these century-old stereotypes by noting, among other points, that Appalachian residents speak a variety of Englishes — and not a single monolithic dialect — and that scorn for the region’s speech is often based on outdated notions of how they talk.

In southwest Virginia, English professor Amy D. Clark has held summer workshops for 15 years for rural teachers to help them teach students to write effectively without shaming them about their speech. The same message runs through teaching units on dialect for schoolchildren in North Carolina and West Virginia.

Proponents say reducing stigmas about speech has resulted in victories such as last year’s decision by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in East Tennessee to cancel classes aimed at reducing workers’ accents.

“You’re trying to get across the idea that all language varieties are legitimate. There’s not one that’s somehow damaged and then others that are just fine,” Hazen said. “They’re all just fine.”

Mountain speech now

The first step in changing perceptions of mountain speech is documenting how contemporary Appalachian residents talk, which is why Hazen, who started the West Virginia Dialect Project in the late 1990s, has invited Smyth and Culicerto to a borrowed conference room at an ambulance company on Pineville’s main street. The building shares the main drag with a dress store, two pharmacies and an accountant, all down the hill from the county courthouse.

Culicerto laughs as he recalls his first encounter with Smyth in the office of Wyoming East High School: “She smiled at me, then I got shy.”

“He didn’t smile back!” Smyth interjects.

“No, I didn’t smile back. I turned away,” he said. But they began chatting over social media and soon were eating breakfast and lunch together every day in the school cafeteria.

In a loosely organized conversation, Hazen and another researcher ask questions about Culicerto and Smyth’s families and their community, such as whether parents are generally involved in teens’ love lives.

The answers themselves are routine, but it’s the underlying sounds the researchers are most interested in.

When Smyth says, “It depends,” the latter half of the word sounds similar to “pin,” an example of a merger of vowel sounds common in the southern part of the state.

Culicerto remarks that in their relationship, both sets of parents ask the couple out to meals, showing an example of a pleonastic — or redundant — pronoun: “Both sides, they always ask.”

The two examples are among enduring dialect features in West Virginia, which Hazen’s research shows have remained steady in the state.

Hazen has also used his research to illustrate that other stereotypical features of Appalachian speech have become rare — such as the demonstrative them (“them apples are the best”) or a-prefixing (“I’m a-going to the store”). Neither of those fading features was heard during the recent interviews in Pineville.

The recording will later be fed into software that allows researchers to analyze one syllable at a time, then catalog each word for further study.

Perceptions persist

Despite what Hazen’s research shows, many outsiders still have negative impressions of people who speak with a mountain accent, sometimes based on outdated speech features. It can take decades for perceptions about language to change.

The tone in the conference room grows more serious when questions turn to whether outsiders comment on the way Smyth and Culicerto talk.

“I think they look at me and they’re like: `Oh my gosh, she lives way back in the holler … and is so redneck!”‘ she said. “They think lower of me.”

The researcher working with Hazen on the interviews, Pineville native Jordan Lovejoy, said she was made to feel self-conscious about how she talked from a young age and worked until recently to change it.

She recalled going to New York as a teenager and feeling embarrassed when a hotel clerk couldn’t understand her request for a pen. On a student government trip to the northern part of West Virginia, other students made fun of how she stretched out the vowel sound in “bill.”

“It’s upsetting,” she said.

A turning point for the recent West Virginia University graduate was taking a class taught by Hazen about the history of dialect in West Virginia. She learned that a Pineville accent “wasn’t necessarily a bad thing … so I try to be a little more natural now,” said Lovejoy.

New grammar

It’s this kind of breakthrough that educators around the region are hoping for as they experiment with novel ways of teaching grammar.

Among them is contrastive analysis, an approach in which students diagram spoken sentences and compare them to formal written English. Contrastive analysis is among the methods discussed at the Appalachian Writing Project’s summer institute for teachers, led by Clark, the English professor in Virginia. About 130 teachers have completed the training program since it started in 2001.

Traditional “right and wrong” approaches to grammar turn off many kids in the mountains, Clark said.

“Kids don’t understand it. They just think they’re speaking a broken English,” said Clark, one of the editors of the book “Talking Appalachian.”

Lizbeth Phillips, a middle-school teacher in southwest Virginia who’s worked with Clark’s project since 2004, assigns her students to keep journals of how adults in their community switch between formal and casual ways of speaking. Educators say the approach, known as code- or style-switching, allows students to preserve the way they speak at home and improve their writing without feeling ashamed.

Phillips said her approach has helped students’ scores on standardized tests, and she was recently asked to work with another English teacher to expand her approach to all eighth-graders at her school.

“If you’re marching out the red pen … you’re really criticizing their culture and their family heritage and other things. It’s not just about standardizing the language,” she said.

“I tell these children all the time: Do not forsake your culture. Do not forsake your spoken language, your home language. Keep that. It’s special,” she added. “But understand: when you’re sitting for an interview at U.Va. or sitting at a job interview, you might not want to say `y’all,’ `you’ns’ and `a-going.”

For middle school students in West Virginia and North Carolina, Hazen and Walt Wolfram of North Carolina State University have worked with colleagues to develop teaching units that emphasize the history of each state’s dialects.

“It gives them a sense of pride,” said Wolfram, who recently spent a week working with kids in a mountain school system. “They think it’s cool. And it also makes them special. It contributes to the sort of cultural capital of kids who want to be from someplace, who want to have a strong heritage and want to be grounded.”

Appalachian culture renaissance

Wolfram believes that Appalachian culture is in the midst of a renaissance in which people are more aware — and more proud — of their heritage.

“There’s a kind of re-appropriation of things `hillbilly,’ which were once considered to be a negative stigma, and embracing it and turning that around into something positive. So people will say, `Yeah, I’m hillbilly, and proud of it!”‘ he said.

William Schumann, the director of the Center for Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University, said the trend is demonstrated by larger number of young adults learning how to play traditional mountain instruments.

“What 20 or 30 years ago was uncool, is cool again. It’s sort of hipster to be into the banjo,” said Schumann, one of the editors of “Appalachia Revisited,” due out next year.

Speakers in the region may purposely use vernacular expressions to show they belong to a group of family or friends. In his article about the word “ain’t,” Hazen notes that all West Virginians are conscious of how the word is perceived, and that for the past three decades, its use has been “a choice of social identity.”

Last summer when the Oak Ridge National Laboratory canceled optional accent reduction classes after some employees complained, the headline in the Knoxville News-Sentinel read: “ORNL bows to Southern pride.”

The speech coach slated to teach the class, Lisa Scott, said she’s noticed a “strong divide” between people who are very proud of their accents and those who want to change them.

Scott said most of her accent reduction clients are foreigners who want to speak English with less of an accent, but that she also has many clients from the South, including a woman who recently called her in tears after being mocked at work.

To Smyth, such tensions are frustrating but very real: “I don’t see anything wrong with me having an accent.”

Sense of place

In the conference room, the late afternoon sun shines through the windows as the interview stretches to nearly two hours.

When the topic turns to the planned construction of a new highway, the couple differs on whether the growth would be a good thing for the county. But they agree they wouldn’t want to grow up anywhere else.

“I like it being a small town. Everybody knows everybody,” Smyth said.

“I couldn’t ask for any other place,” Culicerto adds. “I couldn’t imagine growing up in New York City, Atlanta or Charlotte.”

Culicerto said he finished high school with a perfect 4.0 grade point average. Now an accounting student at Marshall University, he has plans for a master’s degree.

He knows that the stubborn stereotypes outsiders have of people like him can run both ways.

“The way they look at us, we might look at them the same way, like: `Oh they have a city accent.’ But really, we’re all the same.”

Jason Frye, a Wilmington-based travel writer, zeroes in on the Southeast. His third guidebook, “Blue Ridge Parkway Road Trip,” was published in May (Moon/Avalon Travel, $19.99), with four more books for Moon lined up for 2016. Two will be about the Carolinas, one about Asheville and the fourth about Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Frye, 37, wasn’t the only person exploring the scenic road that stretches 469 miles, between Cherokee and Shenandoah National Park in Virginia. The drive is extremely popular: It attracted close to 14 million visitors in 2014.

So we asked him to name great spots along the route that motorists often overlook.

1. Little Switzerland, Milepost 331

“People know there’s the Museum of N.C. Minerals at the exit, and some know there’s actually emerald mining around there. Stop at Emerald Village, a collection of old emerald mines bunched together, that’s fun and interesting. You can actually walk back into the old mines.

“And just a few miles north at this exit is Spruce Pine, and a restaurant called Knife Fork. Its chef, Nathan Allen, is very well known in the Asheville community as a master forager. Here, he looks around the mountains to gather what he prepares. Dining at Knife Fork (www.knifeandforknc.com) is a really elegant, high-end experience in an unexpected location. There’s nothing else like it in the area.”

2. Linville Falls, Milepost 316.3

“People who visit here too often give up on the hike and don’t push on the half-mile to Erwin View, a peak-to-bald vista. And the plunge-basin overlooks, on the north side of the falls, give you a really good view of just how deep Linville Gorge is: It’s known as the ‘Grand Canyon of the East,’ and you get a sense of that at these overlooks.”

3. Folk Art Center, Milepost 382

“It’s near Asheville and also close to the BRP visitor center, so maybe people think, ‘Well, I’ll just push on past this.’ I’m always surprised how few people visit the Folk Art Center (www.southernhighlandguild.org). It’s an excellent stop – almost like a commercial outlet for the Penland School of Craft Schools or John P. Campbell Folk School, and is filled with Appalachian crafts and folk art pieces – brooms to river-rush baskets to carved bowls and more. It reminds me of the Arrowmont School in Gatlinburg, Tenn., which may be better known.”

4. Balsam Mountain, Milepost 458

“There’s a great off-road you can take: Balsam Mountain Road – a 14-mile back-country gravel road that goes around Balsam Mountain along the ridge lines and back down to Cherokee. You really have to commit to it because it becomes a one-way pretty quickly, and takes about an hour and a half from one end to the other. Along the drive, there are trails off the road, blackberry patches and excellent views. If you’re looking for spring wildflowers, rhododendrons in summer or one of the best fall leaf drives, try this.”

5. Sally Mae’s, Milepost 259

“It used to be called the Northwest Trading Post, and is a little deli and gallery. A little farther down the Parkway at Milepost 260.3 is a 1-mile hike that goes to a concrete overlook where there are great fall photo opportunities at Jumpinoff Rock. It’s a relatively easy hike with a slight incline on the way back. The trail takes you to a great view … and people don’t realize it’s there.”

6. The Orchard at Altapass, Milepost 328

“The orchard produces 120,000 bushels of apples, some from heirloom trees, and it has you-pick-’em in late summer and fall. But from May to about October, it also offers events and some great classes in Appalachian culture and folkways – teaching things like dancing, quilting or broom-making (www.altapassorchard.org). It’s really interesting – and at a beautiful spot.”

7. Floyd, Va., Milepost 165

“Floyd is a free-spirited little mountain town where you have this odd confluence of old Virginia farming families and an artist/hippie community that has moved in. One thing that makes Floyd special is that it’s one of the stops on the Crooked Road – Virginia’s tourism route linking old-time music and mountain heritage. In the Country Store, a general mercantile in Floyd, they clear out the aisles and roll back the shelving on Friday nights for a big dance floor and have a jamboree with regional or national bluegrass or old-time bands. You can see three generations of families out there dancing. The Friday jamboree has spilled out and become a big street party, with 70 or 80 musicians jamming in pairs, trios and quartets.”

8. Chateau Morrisette, Milepost 171.5

“Many Virginians know about this, but it remains sort of the secret. There’s a good little bistro on the winery grounds, and a live-music series (www.thedogs.com). There are several celebrations through the year that are good to see. Chateau Morrisette is one of the oldest vineyards in (Virginia).”

9. Bedford, Va., Milepost 86

“This is a great jumping-off point if you want to explore Roanoke, one of Virginia’s largest cities, or go boating at Smith Mountain Lake. You’re close enough to those spots … but far enough away to feel you’re absorbing some of Bedford’s small-town charm. The National D-Day Memorial (www.dday.org) is in Bedford; there’s also a wine trail, apple orchards and things like that.”

10. Peaks of Otter Recreation Area, Milepost 85.9

“People typically go on the BRP to do a lot of short, less-challenging hikes. The two here are different: The climb to Sharp Top is 3 miles and pretty steep; the climb to Round Top is 9 miles – not strenuous, but long. Both hikes are fantastic and have gorgeous views. I’ve done both at dawn and done Round Top at sunset. So long as you have appropriate equipment, both are doable … and well worth it.”

U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter continues his North Carolina visit as a major convention gathers in Charlotte.

Carter is scheduled to speak Saturday to the annual conference of the National Association of Counties. Carter is speaking to county officials around the country about how communities prepare men and women in uniform today and for the future.

Other speakers at the convention are former Charlotte mayor and U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx, NASCAR racing driver Danica Patrick, former UNC and NBA basketball player Brad Daugherty.

Carter visited Friday with soldiers at Fort Bragg to assure the troops that the nation’s military would be able to defend itself against multiple foreign threats even as the Army reduces its force to pre-World War II levels.