Alice's Adventures in an Appalachian Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's classic "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" has been translated into over a hundred languages, from French to Japanese to Esperanto. In this translation into the rich dialect of the Appalachian Mountains, the translators have treated the story as a folktale, in order to create the sense that the reader is listening as an adult tells the story to a child. The story has been transported from Victorian English to post-Civil-War West Virginia, into an Appalachian setting appropriate for the dialect. The spelling used aims towards a literary ortho­graphy, rather than towards a phonemic respelling of the language entirely, and so it avoids unnecessary "eye-dialect" ("funkshun" instead of "function", and so forth). The sounds of the language used in "Alice's Adventures in an Appalachian Wonderland" will certainly be familiar to most readers, but a short glossary has also been included.