Representation Of Dialect Research Articles

Strange Talk: The Politics of Literature in Gilded Age America (review)

Reviewed by: Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America by Gavin Jones Edwin Battistella Strange talk: The politics of literature in Gilded Age America. By Gavin Jones. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Pp. 288. Interest in American regional speech and its consequences is as old as the nation itself. The period following [End Page 402] the Civil War was a particularly interesting period in that it saw the rise of dialect literature and the rise of commentary on dialect literature as well. In Strange talk, Gavin Jones argues that late nineteenth-century American culture—that of the so-called Gilded Age—was fundamentally ambivalent about dialect—seeing it as both representative of the vitality of American culture and as carrying the seeds of cultural fragmentation. The book consists of a brief introduction and conclusion and six main chapters. J has organized his book largely around different literary topics and genres which illustrate cultural attitudes and reactions to social change. Ch. 1, titled ‘Contaminated tongues: American philology and the problem of dialect’ (14–36), describes the attitudes toward dialect reflected in the scholarly work of the day—including that of William Dwight Whitney, Thomas Loundsbury, and E. A. Shelton, first president of the American Dialect Society. Their views reflect in part those of earlier scholars and writers that a common language of the American masses would emerge in the United States, but they also demonstrate occasional sympathy to the tradition of verbal criticism and correction of such writers as Richard Grant White, William Mathews, and George Perkins Marsh, who saw dialect use as a sign of moral degeneration and of the vulgarization of higher culture. In Ch. 2 (37–63), ‘Cult of the vernacular’, J discusses the use of dialect literature as a form of satire and as a reflection of literary realism. An assumption of the time was the idea that language reflected ways of thinking as well as ways of speaking. J notes that such writers as Mark Twain were ambivalent toward regional literature—both celebrating it and fearing its influence—and that this ambivalence is reflected in narrative inconsistency toward regional dialect. Ch. 3, ‘Language, gender and disease’ (64–97), treats the correlation between ‘faulty speech’ and social and cultural disease that was common in novels of the time. J especially focuses on ways in which Herman Melville and Henry James connected speech defects and defects of social and cultural behavior. Two psychological disorders much discussed in the Gilded Age were heterophony (confusion of words) and neurasthenia (nervousness), both of which were seen as symptoms of the corruption of cultural authority. Of special interest is J’s discussion of James’s essay on ‘The speech of American women’, which attributed indirection in language to the speech of women. In ‘White writers, creole languages’ (Ch. 4, 98–133), J examines the dialect literature of George Washington Cable and others whose work suggested a racially-mixed definition of Southern speech unsettling to white sensibilities of the time. J argues that literary and scholarly depictions of black English served two functions: to reinforce the view of black language as deficient but also to make the connection between black English and African and Caribbean languages (providing a counterview to the literary representation of black language as derivative of white Southern speech). The representation of dialect was complex rather than homogeneous, and the rhetorical features of African-American speech—including the potential for subversive humor—made it an effective narrative vehicle. Ch. 5, ‘Accents of menace alien to our air’: Language and literature in turn-of-the-century New York City’ (134–60), discusses the treatment of immigrant language in the tenement and immigrant fiction of the 1880’s and 1890’s—particularly the work of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan who extended local color writing from dialect literature to the immigrant experience. J notes that Crane’s approach focused on treating New York speech as decayed while Cahan’s focused on the hybrid nature of New Yorkese. The two approaches represent contrasting literary interpretations of urban life, one an attempt to capture the decay of language and the other an effort to characterize its transformation by immigrant voices...

The use of literary dialect in Uncle Tom's Cabin

This article explores Stowe's use of dialect in her controversial novel. Though some critics have mentioned the 'colorful language' of Stowe's characters, most debates about Uncle Tom's Cabin have not centered on the dialect representation in the speech of her characters. This article provides an objective analysis of Stowe's use of literary dialect in the speech of three characters (Aunt Chloe, George and Mr Haley) using the methods of quantitative linguistics. The frequency of occurrence of linguistic features and the distribution of non-standard features among Stowe's characters demonstrates that Stowe was, in several respects, remarkably accurate, both linguistically and historically. Stowe's characters' dialects illustrate an interesting period in the history of American dialect formation. Recent studies in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and the investigation of its origins have suggested a close relationship between AAVE and Southern White Vernacular English (SWVE) as a result of the sociohistorical context in which AAVE began. This relationship is reflected in the similarities between the speech of Aunt Chloe and Mr Haley and shows Stowe's portrayal of these dialects to be historically accurate. Stowe's linguistic accuracy is evidenced by the fact that each character's use of linguistic features mirrors that of actual speakers, in terms of specific dialect features and their frequency of use, and her distribution of features across social variables matches that found in sociolinguistic research.

The Good, the Bad, and the Foreign: The Use of Dialect in Children's Animated Television

This article presents an analysis of visual and behavioral representation of character and dialect in children's animated television programming. Trained coders analyzed a sample of a dozen cartoons, including those aired on cable, network, and the Public Broadcasting Service. Cartoons were coded for a variety of personality and visual characteristics as well as for dialect and foreign accents. Results indicated that children's animated programming continues to underrepresent people of color and women. Linguistically, gender and ethnicity were marked by use of dialect stereotypes. Notably, villains consistently used non-American accents.

‘Folk-Speech’ and ‘Book English’: Re-presentations of Dialect in Hardy's Novels

In an attempt to evaluate the fidelity of Hardy's representation of dialect speech, critics have made implicit or explicit reference to dialects actually spoken at the time Hardy wrote his novels of rural life. To this end, comparisons are often made between features of ‘Wessex dialect’ and contemporary records of dialects produced by amateur dialectologists, such as Hardy's friend William Barnes. In this article I propose a new approach to the relationship between non-fictional records of dialects in the nineteenth century and the literary representation of dialect speech in Hardy's novels. I argue that the considerable practical and theoretical difficulties that are to be found in non-fictional records of dialects, mean that Hardy's version of dialect speech cannot be read back on to authentic dialect speech. Only when the non-literary definition and representation of dialects are recognised as problematic, can questions be asked which reveal the true complexity of dialect speech in the novels. I demonstrate a reading of the language of Hardy's novels as a complex intersection of contemporary rules of definition of dialects, which are re-presented in the texts as internally and mutually contradictory discourses. Focusing upon the discursive construction of the sign of ‘Wessex dialect’, I indicate how Hardy's literary version of dialect speech can be read as a political critique of the definition and representation of the opposition between ‘folk-speech’ and ‘book English’ at the time the novels were written.

The Significations of Representing Dialect in Writing

This article reviews some of the constraints and implications involved in the reporting of speech in fiction and elsewhere, paying particular attention to some of the issues that attend the representation of dialect. A number of cases are discussed, but a specific focus is the apparent absence of rendering of urban black South African speech in the fiction of the pre-eminent contemporary white South African writers, J.M. Coetzee and N. Gordimer. This absence of ‘giving voice’ is interpreted as an avoidance strategy, seemingly necessary but certainly troubled, given the charged socio-political context, in which for these authors to represent the voices of those individuals could too easily be construed as appropriation. In this case; as in others discussed, questions of power, distance versus affinity, and rights of free expression and of silence are involved.

Scholarly Responsibility and the Representation of Dialects: The Case of English in Texas

Scholarly Responsibility and the Representation of Dialects: The Case of English in Texas

Scholarly Responsibility and the Representation of Dialects: The Case of English in Texas

Scholarly Responsibility and the Representation of Dialects: The Case of English in Texas

Mark Twain's Representation of Negro Speech

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