Citations:eye dialect

English citations of eye dialect

• 1992, Levenston, The Stuff of Literature:

  Eye dialect as a device for revealing a character's social status has a recognized place in the history of narrative fiction.

Nonstandard spelling of standard pronunciation

• 1942 October, James Nathan Tidwell "Mark Twain's Representation of Negro Speech" American Speech (Duke University Press) Vol. 17, No. 3 pp.174–176 [at p.174]:

  He shows his linguistic sense by using ‘eye dialect’ in only five words: ben (been), b’fo’ (first syllable), han’s, wuz, and um. By not re-spelling words for eye dialect, Twain makes Jim's conversation easy reading. Only about one-third of the words are re-spelled at all, and nearly all of these indicate some variation from Standard English—low colloquial, Southern American, or Negro.

• 1986 E. A. Levenston and Gabriela Sonnenschein. "The translation of point-of-view in fictional narrative." Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies. (Tübingen: Narr) pp.49–59 [at p.57]:

  Particularly interesting is the use of eye-dialect, e.g. spelling "for" as "fer", to suggest that the speaker is ill-educated, even though the pronunciations indicated by such spellings are common to educated speakers.

• 1992, Levenston, The Stuff of Literature:

  Eye-dialect spellings, indicating nondeviant pronunciation, include "sed,", "wuns," "wos".

• 2004 Kirk Hazen and Ellen Fluharty "Defining Appalachian English." in Linguistic diversity in the South: Changing codes, practices, and ideology [Southern Anthropological Society proceedings, Volume 37: University of Georgia Press] pp.50–65 [at p.52]:

  The strip relies heavily on nonstandard spelling (e.g., "propitty" for "property") and eye dialect (e.g., yore for your) to indicate the educational attainment of its characters.

• (mention) 2008, Geoffrey S. Nathan, Phonology: A Cognitive Grammar Introduction:

  .. a way of marking that the person is speaking sloppily (or in some stigmatized dialect), but has no linguistic reality – there's nothing non-standard about how they pronounced the word. The technical name for this kind of spelling is eye dialect.

• (mention) 2010, Dean McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt and the Fictions of Race:

  Humorists often intensified this effect with "eye dialect," misspellings that are not caused by mispronunciation.

Nonstandard spelling of nonstandard pronunciation

• 1963 July–September, Laurence Urdang, Review of "Problems in Lexicography: Report of the Conference on Lexicography Held at Indiana University November 11-12, 1960." in Language, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 586–594 [at p.589]:

  Eye dialect presents acute problems: does the lexicographer (of the bilingual or monolingual dictionary) show ‘shet’ for shut, ‘mouf’ for mouth, ‘shaddap!’ for shut up!, and so on?

• 2006 Emily Apter, "Translation after 9/11." Transit Vol.2 No.1:

  Irvine Welsh's puns on Scottish vernacular, drug slang, and eye dialect (in Trainspotting)

• (mention) 2014, Lewis Herman, Marguerite Shalett Herman, American Dialects: A Manual for Actors, Directors, and Writers:

  In much of the regional literature you will find examples of what is known as “eye-dialect.” This is an attempt at transcribing dialect speech with the ordinary alphabet.