A basic overview of eye dialect

This is a brief overview of "eye dialect" to be used in conjunction with study of the poem "An Ante-Bellum Sermon."

1. A Basic Overview of Eye Dialect

2. Look at the poem. What patterns did you notice in spellings? What patterns did you notice in pronunciations? Can you make some generalizations about this dialect?

3. A little history “Eye dialect” was first named such in 1925 by George P. Krapp in The English Language in America The term was used to describe unconventional spellings in an attempt to represent how a particular group of people speak. Krapp says, “the convention violated is one of the eyes, and not of the ear.” Authors use it to show how certain characters in certain areas or groups speak.

4. Definition Paul Hudd Bowdrey Jr. (who wrote a thesis on the topic) defines this dialect as: “…words and groups of words which for any one of a number of possible reasons have been spelled in a manner which to the eye is recognizably nonstandard, but which to the ear still indicates a pronunciation that is standard throughout the United States or, in most instances, throughout the English-speaking world” (1).

5. Basic Features

6. Don’t get stressed… Many words are said differently when they are stressed verses when they’re unstressed. Spelling the unstressed form is a typical feature of eye-dialect.

7. S ome examples: fer /for: What are you screamin ’ fer ? t er /to:   Come tur my house. y er /your:  T hat's yer problem. bin/been:  W here you bin ?

8. Shortening d eleted “h”:   Take ' im with you. ‘ em /them : I told ' em I to go home. d'you /do you':   What d'you mean by that? g onna /going to:   You gonna go tonight? o utta/out of:   Get outta here! k inda /kind of:   What kinda answer is that? sort've or sorta / sort of:   It’s sorta funny. Wanna /want to:   I don't wanna know the answer.

9. Alternative spellings Eye dialect also involves spelling words as they sound; most of these could not be pronounced in any other way . Eye dialect is just as much about the eye (the way words look) as the ear (the way that look matches with real sounds).

10. Some examples: j est/just : She was jest leavin ’. w oz /was:  It woz a great day. s hore/sure:   Are you shore about that? What other examples can you find in the poem?

11. Deletion of consonants Words ending in - ing are shortened to –in’ Meeting becomes meetin ’ Of becomes, simply, ‘o Strings of three consonants are eliminated by deletion, vowel addition, or rearranging This is called “consonant cluster reduction” and happens naturally, all the time Children becomes childern Hundred becomes hunderd

12. Slang terms As with any dialect, eye dialect also involves special words (slang) for particular expressions.

13. Some examples: “Whose only bugbear seemed to be…” “It tickled me all over” “We’d jine our lots” Using context clues, determine what these may mean.

14. Sources To read more, check out these two sites: http:// ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/00/09/79/22/00001/studyofeyedialec00bowdrich.pdf http:// homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SpellingNovel/EyeDialect.htm http:// www.uniss.it/lingue/annali_file/vol_6/4_Brett_Lost.pdf