Mark Twain's Representation of Negro Speech

Abstract

N AN INTRODUCTORY explanatory note to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain says that the representations of dialects have been done 'painstakingly.' The care Twain took with dialectical pronunciation is well revealed by an intensive study of the pronunciation of Nigger Jim. The eight pages in which Jim tells Huck of his running away from his owner' provide ample materials for studying Twain's representation of Missouri Negro speech. He shows his linguistic sense by using 'eye dialect' in only five words: ben (been), b'fo' (first syllable), han's, wuz, and um. But even the last two of these are used for purposes of distinction, as will be shown later. By not re-spelling words for eye dialect, Twain makes Jim's conversation easy reading. Only about one-third of the words are respelled at all, and nearly all of these indicate some variation from Standard English-low colloquial, Southern American, or Negro. Thirty of the re-spelled words show low colloquial pronunciations: acrost, afeard, alwuz (stressed), awluz (unstressed), ag'in (again), agin (against), bymeby, dumb, chanst, ef (unstressed if), hain't (haven't), jis, jedged, genlmen, ketched (cached), kin (can), fur (far), fer (unstressed for), git, a-holt, kinder, more'n, mysef, off'n, out'n, resk, skift (skiff), tuck (took), wisht (wish), and wunst. In addition, Twain consistently spells words ending in -ing with only -in'; one exception occurs in the word a-stirring, which must be taken as an oversight. The dialect of the low colloquial speaker is further indicated by the use of participles with aprefixes. Of the twenty participles which occur in the passage under consideration, eight have this prefix. The author's principle seems to have been to use the prefix only when the participle was immediately preceded by a consonant; at least in this passage all eight examples of the form occur after preceding consonant sounds. Twain indicates the Southern dialect by dropping unstressed syllables, by omitting post-vocalic and final r's, by diphthongizing [e] into [el], by dropping the final consonant of an ending consonant combination, and by preserving the archaic [aI] pronunciation of oi. Unstressed syllables are dropped almost consistently in words like 'bove, 'way, b'longs, b'lieve, and k'leck; the two exceptions to the dropping are business, which drops