Eye dialect
Encyclopedia
Eye dialect is the use of non-standard spelling for speech to draw attention to pronunciation. The term was originally coined by George P. Krapp to refer to the literary technique of using non-standard spelling that implies a pronunciation of the given word that is actually standard, such as wimmin for women; the spelling indicates that the character's speech overall is dialect
al, foreign, or uneducated. This form of non-standard spelling differs from others in that a difference in spelling does not indicate a difference in pronunciation of a word. That is, it looks like a rendering of dialect but does not sound like it. It suggests that a character "would use a vulgar pronunciation if there were one" and "is at the level of ignorance where one misspells in this fashion, hence mispronounces as well."
The term is less commonly also used to refer to pronunciation spelling
s, that is, spellings of words that indicate that they are pronounced in a non-standard way. For example, an author might write dat as an attempt at accurate transcription of a nonstandard pronunciation of that.
The rest of this article will discuss the former definition. See pronunciation spelling for the latter.
, Joel Chandler Harris
, William Faulkner
, Robert Ruark
, and Charles Dickens
.
However, most authors are likely to use eye dialect with restraint, sprinkling non-standard misspelling here and there to serve as a cue to the reader about all of a character's speech, rather than as an accurate phonetic representation.
While mostly used in dialogue, eye dialect may appear in the narrative depiction of altered spelling made by a character (such as in a letter or diary entry), generally used to more overtly depict characters who are poorly educated or semi-literate.
Eye dialect is often employed when authors wish to establish a sympathetic sense of superiority between themselves and the reader as contrasted with the non-standard speech of the character. Such spellings serve mainly to "denigrate the speaker so represented by making him or her appear boorish, uneducated, rustic, gangsterish, and so on". "The convention violated is one of the eyes, not of the ear".
Jane Raymond Walpole points out that there are other ways to indicate speech variation such as altered syntax, punctuation, and colloquial or regional word choices. She observes that a reader must be prompted to access their memory of a given speech pattern and that non-orthographic signals that accomplish this may be more effective than eye dialect. Frank Nuessel points out that use of eye dialect closely interacts with stereotypes about various groups, both relying on and reinforcing them in an attempt to efficiently characterize speech.
In The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction, John Dufresne
cites The Columbia Guide to Standard American English in suggesting that writers avoid eye dialect; he argues that it is frequently pejorative, making a character seem stupid rather than regional, and is more distracting than helpful. Like Walpole, Dufresne suggests that dialect should be rendered by "rhythm of the prose, by the syntax, the diction, idioms and figures of speech, by the vocabulary indigenous to the locale."
Eye dialect, when consistently applied, may render a character's speech indecipherable. An attempt to accurately render nonstandard speech may also prove difficult to readers unfamiliar with a particular accent.
is dialogue spoken by Jo, the miserable boy who sweeps a path across a street:
Here wos, sed, and wuns indicate standard pronunciations.
The American cartoonist Al Capp
frequently combined eye dialect with pronunciation spelling in his strip "Li'l Abner
". Examples include lissen, aristocratick, mountin [mountain], correkt, feends, hed, introduckshun, leppard, and perhaps the most common, enuff. Only his rustic characters are given these spellings; for instance, the "overcivilized" Bounder J. Roundheels's dialogue contains gourmets, while Li'l Abner's contains goormays.
In his Discworld
series, Terry Pratchett
makes extensive use of eye dialect to extend the caricature of his characters, even going to the point of changing the font used for certain dialog. Death
, for example, speaks in small capitals, while the dialog of a golem
who can only communicate by writing resembles Hebrew script, in reference to the origins of the golem legend. Eye dialect is also used to establish a medieval setting, wherein many characters' grasp of spelling is heavily based on phonetics.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly
used eye dialect for most of the characters in his classic comic strip, Pogo, and, like Pratchett afterward, used unique fonts for many of his supporting cast.
Many cartoonists and comic book creators eschew phonetic eye dialects in favor of font changes or distinctive speech balloons -- Swamp Thing
, for example, has traditionally been depicted using "crusty" yellow speech balloons and dialogue heavily laced with ellipses, suggesting a gravelly voice that only speaks with great effort. Robotic and computer characters often use square speech balloons and angular fonts reminiscent of OCR-A
, suggesting a stilted, emotionless cadence. An example of a comic that does both is Order of the Stick, where some characters (particularly ones that are unusual in some way, such as being undead
or from another plane of existence
) will have oddly colored word bubbles, whereas Dwarfs speak with an eye dialect.
In Russian, Vasiliy Shukshin's story "Moy zyat' ukral mashinu drov" ("My son-in-law stole a carful of firewood") has the main character say "Што?" for "What?" instead of the expected "Что?" (что is normally pronounced [ʂto], not [tɕto], as if it were spelled with ⟨ш⟩). The character is a delivery driver in Siberia and the eye dialect emphasizes his uneducated nature.
The novel Zazie dans le Métro
is famously written in French which disregards almost all French spelling conventions.
The Norwegian author Hans Jæger
's trilogy The Erotic Confessions of the Bohemians (1893–1903) is written in a Norwegian form of eye dialect.
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
al, foreign, or uneducated. This form of non-standard spelling differs from others in that a difference in spelling does not indicate a difference in pronunciation of a word. That is, it looks like a rendering of dialect but does not sound like it. It suggests that a character "would use a vulgar pronunciation if there were one" and "is at the level of ignorance where one misspells in this fashion, hence mispronounces as well."
The term is less commonly also used to refer to pronunciation spelling
Pronunciation spelling
A pronunciation spelling of a word is a spelling different from the standard spelling, used to emphasize a particular pronunciation of the word. The spelling uses the regular spelling rules of the language. Most are nonce coinages, but some have become standardised, e.g...
s, that is, spellings of words that indicate that they are pronounced in a non-standard way. For example, an author might write dat as an attempt at accurate transcription of a nonstandard pronunciation of that.
The rest of this article will discuss the former definition. See pronunciation spelling for the latter.
Use
Some notable authors who utilize eye dialect include Mark TwainMark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
, Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris
Joel Chandler Harris was an American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist best known for his collection of Uncle Remus stories. Harris was born in Eatonton, Georgia, where he served as an apprentice on a plantation during his teenage years...
, William Faulkner
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
, Robert Ruark
Robert Ruark
Robert Ruark was an American author and syndicated columnist.- Early life :...
, and Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens
Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...
.
However, most authors are likely to use eye dialect with restraint, sprinkling non-standard misspelling here and there to serve as a cue to the reader about all of a character's speech, rather than as an accurate phonetic representation.
While mostly used in dialogue, eye dialect may appear in the narrative depiction of altered spelling made by a character (such as in a letter or diary entry), generally used to more overtly depict characters who are poorly educated or semi-literate.
Eye dialect is often employed when authors wish to establish a sympathetic sense of superiority between themselves and the reader as contrasted with the non-standard speech of the character. Such spellings serve mainly to "denigrate the speaker so represented by making him or her appear boorish, uneducated, rustic, gangsterish, and so on". "The convention violated is one of the eyes, not of the ear".
Jane Raymond Walpole points out that there are other ways to indicate speech variation such as altered syntax, punctuation, and colloquial or regional word choices. She observes that a reader must be prompted to access their memory of a given speech pattern and that non-orthographic signals that accomplish this may be more effective than eye dialect. Frank Nuessel points out that use of eye dialect closely interacts with stereotypes about various groups, both relying on and reinforcing them in an attempt to efficiently characterize speech.
In The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction, John Dufresne
John Dufresne
John Dufresne is an American author of French Canadian descent born in Worcester, Massachusetts. He graduated from Worcester State College in 1970 and the University of Arkansas in 1984. He is a professor in the Master of Fine Arts Creative Writing program of the English Department at Florida...
cites The Columbia Guide to Standard American English in suggesting that writers avoid eye dialect; he argues that it is frequently pejorative, making a character seem stupid rather than regional, and is more distracting than helpful. Like Walpole, Dufresne suggests that dialect should be rendered by "rhythm of the prose, by the syntax, the diction, idioms and figures of speech, by the vocabulary indigenous to the locale."
Eye dialect, when consistently applied, may render a character's speech indecipherable. An attempt to accurately render nonstandard speech may also prove difficult to readers unfamiliar with a particular accent.
Examples in English
Charles Dickens may have used eye dialect more than any other author in English, combining it with pronunciation spelling and nonstandard grammar in the speech of his uneducated characters. An example in Bleak HouseBleak House
Bleak House is the ninth novel by Charles Dickens, published in twenty monthly installments between March 1852 and September 1853. It is held to be one of Dickens's finest novels, containing one of the most vast, complex and engaging arrays of minor characters and sub-plots in his entire canon...
is dialogue spoken by Jo, the miserable boy who sweeps a path across a street:
- ...there wos other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded as to be a-talking to theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin to us.
Here wos, sed, and wuns indicate standard pronunciations.
The American cartoonist Al Capp
Al Capp
Alfred Gerald Caplin , better known as Al Capp, was an American cartoonist and humorist best known for the satirical comic strip Li'l Abner. He also wrote the comic strips Abbie an' Slats and Long Sam...
frequently combined eye dialect with pronunciation spelling in his strip "Li'l Abner
Li'l Abner
Li'l Abner is a satirical American comic strip that appeared in many newspapers in the United States, Canada and Europe, featuring a fictional clan of hillbillies in the impoverished town of Dogpatch, Kentucky. Written and drawn by Al Capp , the strip ran for 43 years, from August 13, 1934 through...
". Examples include lissen, aristocratick, mountin [mountain], correkt, feends, hed, introduckshun, leppard, and perhaps the most common, enuff. Only his rustic characters are given these spellings; for instance, the "overcivilized" Bounder J. Roundheels's dialogue contains gourmets, while Li'l Abner's contains goormays.
In his Discworld
Discworld
Discworld is a comic fantasy book series by English author Sir Terry Pratchett, set on the Discworld, a flat world balanced on the backs of four elephants which, in turn, stand on the back of a giant turtle, Great A'Tuin. The books frequently parody, or at least take inspiration from, J. R. R....
series, Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett
Sir Terence David John "Terry" Pratchett, OBE is an English novelist, known for his frequently comical work in the fantasy genre. He is best known for his popular and long-running Discworld series of comic fantasy novels...
makes extensive use of eye dialect to extend the caricature of his characters, even going to the point of changing the font used for certain dialog. Death
Death (Discworld)
Death is a fictional character in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and a parody of several other personifications of death. Like most Grim Reapers, he is a black-robed skeleton usually carrying a scythe...
, for example, speaks in small capitals, while the dialog of a golem
Golem
In Jewish folklore, a golem is an animated anthropomorphic being, created entirely from inanimate matter. The word was used to mean an amorphous, unformed material in Psalms and medieval writing....
who can only communicate by writing resembles Hebrew script, in reference to the origins of the golem legend. Eye dialect is also used to establish a medieval setting, wherein many characters' grasp of spelling is heavily based on phonetics.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly
Walt Kelly
Walter Crawford Kelly, Jr. , or Walt Kelly, was an American animator and cartoonist, best known for the comic strip, Pogo. He began his animation career in 1936 at Walt Disney Studios, contributing to Pinocchio and Fantasia. Kelly resigned in 1941 at the age of 28 to work at Post-Hall Syndicate,...
used eye dialect for most of the characters in his classic comic strip, Pogo, and, like Pratchett afterward, used unique fonts for many of his supporting cast.
Many cartoonists and comic book creators eschew phonetic eye dialects in favor of font changes or distinctive speech balloons -- Swamp Thing
Swamp Thing
Swamp Thing, a fictional character, is a plant elemental in the created by Len Wein and Berni Wrightson. He first appeared in House of Secrets #92 in a stand-alone horror story set in the early 20th century . The Swamp Thing then returned in his own series, set in the contemporary world and in...
, for example, has traditionally been depicted using "crusty" yellow speech balloons and dialogue heavily laced with ellipses, suggesting a gravelly voice that only speaks with great effort. Robotic and computer characters often use square speech balloons and angular fonts reminiscent of OCR-A
OCR-A font
In the early days of computer optical character recognition, there was a need for a font thatcould be recognized by the computers of that day, and byhumans...
, suggesting a stilted, emotionless cadence. An example of a comic that does both is Order of the Stick, where some characters (particularly ones that are unusual in some way, such as being undead
Undead
Undead is a collective name for fictional, mythological, or legendary beings that are deceased and yet behave as if alive. Undead may be incorporeal, such as ghosts, or corporeal, such as vampires and zombies...
or from another plane of existence
Parallel universe (fiction)
A parallel universe or alternative reality is a hypothetical self-contained separate reality coexisting with one's own. A specific group of parallel universes is called a "multiverse", although this term can also be used to describe the possible parallel universes that constitute reality...
) will have oddly colored word bubbles, whereas Dwarfs speak with an eye dialect.
Examples in other languages
In the Chilean comic Mampato, the character Ogú replaces hard ⟨c⟩ with ⟨k⟩ (e.g. ⟨komida⟩ instead of ⟨comida⟩), to show that his accent is strange.In Russian, Vasiliy Shukshin's story "Moy zyat' ukral mashinu drov" ("My son-in-law stole a carful of firewood") has the main character say "Што?" for "What?" instead of the expected "Что?" (что is normally pronounced [ʂto], not [tɕto], as if it were spelled with ⟨ш⟩). The character is a delivery driver in Siberia and the eye dialect emphasizes his uneducated nature.
The novel Zazie dans le Métro
Zazie in the Metro
Zazie in the Metro — or simply Zazie, depending on the translation — a French novel written in 1959, was the first major success of author Raymond Queneau...
is famously written in French which disregards almost all French spelling conventions.
The Norwegian author Hans Jæger
Hans Jæger
Hans Henrik Jæger was a Norwegian writer, philosopher and anarchist political activist who was part of the Oslo based bohemian group Kristianiabohêmen. He was prosecuted for his book Fra Kristiania-bohêmen and convicted to 60 days' imprisonment in a supreme court ruling in 1886...
's trilogy The Erotic Confessions of the Bohemians (1893–1903) is written in a Norwegian form of eye dialect.
See also
- Apologetic apostropheApologetic apostropheThe apologetic or parochial apostrophe is the distinctive use of apostrophes in Modern Scots orthography. Apologetic apostrophes generally occurred where a consonant exists in the Standard English cognate, as in a , gi'e and wi .The practice, unknown in Older Scots, was introduced in the 18th...
- Inventive spellingInventive spellingInventive spelling, or invented spelling, is the non-conventional spelling of a word created by a novice reader or writer. It contrasts with conventional spelling, the correct or standard spelling.- Overview :...
- MondegreenMondegreenA mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase as a result of near homophony, in a way that gives it a new meaning. It most commonly is applied to a line in a poem or a lyric in a song...
- PrevedPrevedPreved is a term used in the Padonkaffsky jargon, a meme in the Russian-speaking Internet which developed out of a heavily-circulated picture, and consists of choosing alternative spellings for words for comic effect...
- Satiric misspelling
- SMS languageSMS languageSMS language or textese is a term for the abbreviations and slang most commonly used due to the necessary brevity of mobile phone text messaging, in particular the widespread SMS SMS language or textese (also known as txt-speak, txtese, chatspeak, txt, txtspk, txtk, txto, texting language, txt...
Further reading
- Bowdre, Paul H., Jr. (1971). Eye dialect as a literary device. In J. V. Williamson & V. M. Burke (Eds.), A various language (pp. 178–179). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Fine, Elizabeth. (1983). In defense of literary dialect: A response to Dennis R. Preston. The Journal of American Folklore, 96 (381), 323-330.
- Ives, Sumner. (1950). A theory of literary dialect. Tulane Studies in English, 2, 137-182.
- Ives, Sumner. (1971). A theory of literary dialect. In J. V. Williamson & V. M. Burke (Eds.), A various language (pp. 145–177). New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
- Krapp, George P. (1926). The psychology of dialect writing. The Bookman, 63, 522-527.
- Macaulay, Ronald K. S. (1991). Coz It Izny Spelt When Then Say It: Displaying Dialect in Writing. American Speech, 66 (3), 280-291.
- Preston, Dennis R. (1982). Ritin' fowklower daun 'rong: Folklorists' failures in phonology. The Journal of American Folklore, 95 (377), 304-326.
- Preston, Dennis R. (1983). Mowr bayud spellin': A reply to Fine. The Journal of American Folklore, 96 (381), 330-339.
- Preston, Dennis R. (1985). The Li'l Abner syndrome: Written representations of speech. American Speech, 60 (4), 328-336.