Eye dialect


Eye dialect is the use of words that are deliberately misspelled but properly pronounced. The term was coined by George Philip Krapp to refer to the literary technique of using nonstandard 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 dialectal, foreign, or uneducated. This form of nonstandard spelling differs from others in that a difference in spelling does not indicate a difference in pronunciation of a word. That is, it is dialect to the eye rather than to the ear.

Use

Some authors who use eye dialect include Harriet Beecher Stowe, Maya Angelou, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, Greer Gilman, Alex Haley, Joel Chandler Harris, Russell Hoban, Terry Pratchett, James Whitcomb Riley, J.K. Rowling, Robert Ruark, John Steinbeck, Mark Twain, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Paul Howard, and Irvine Welsh. However, most authors are likely to use eye dialect with restraint, sprinkling nonstandard 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, generally used to more overtly depict characters who are poorly educated or semi-literate.
The term eye dialect was first used by George Philip Krapp in 1925. "The convention violated", he wrote, "is one of the eyes, not of the ear.". According to Krapp, it was not used to indicate a real difference in pronunciation but
The term is less commonly used to refer to pronunciation spellings, that is, spellings of words that indicate that they are pronounced in a nonstandard way. For example, an author might write dat as an attempt at accurate transcription of a nonstandard pronunciation of that.
In an article on written representations of speech in a non-literary context, for instance transcription by sociolinguists, Denis R.Preston argued that such spellings serve mainly to "denigrate the speaker so represented by making him or her appear boorish, uneducated, rustic, gangsterish, and so on".
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". Other writers have noted that eye dialect is employed in racist ways, with accented white speech transcribed using standard spelling, while accented non-white speech is transcribed with non-standard spelling.
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

Prose fiction

combined eye dialect with pronunciation spelling and nonstandard grammar in the speech of his uneducated characters. An example in Bleak House is the following dialogue spoken by Jo, the miserable boy who sweeps a path across a street:
Here wos, sed, and wuns indicate standard pronunciations.
In his Discworld series, Terry Pratchett makes extensive use of eye dialect to extend the caricature of his characters, including changing the font used for certain dialogue. Death, for example, speaks in small capitals, while the dialogue 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.

In comics

American cartoonist Al Capp frequently combined eye dialect with pronunciation spelling in his comic strip Li'l Abner. Examples include lissen, aristocratick, mountin , 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.
Cartoonist Walt Kelly made extensive use of eye dialect in his classic strip Pogo. Like Pratchett, he used unique fonts for many of his supporting cast.
Some 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, etc.

Other uses

American film director Quentin Tarantino used eye dialect for the title of his movie Inglourious Basterds.

Examples in other languages

In the Chilean comic Mampato, the character Ogú replaces hard ⟨c⟩ with ⟨k⟩, to show that his accent is strange.
In Russian, Vasiliy Shukshin's story "Мой зять украл машину дров" has the main character say "Што?" for "What?" instead of the expected "Что?". 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 that disregards almost all French spelling conventions.
The Norwegian author Hans Jæger's trilogy The Erotic Confessions of the Bohemians is written in a Norwegian form of eye dialect.
The whole Russian Padonki dialect is based on deliberate misspelling of words.