Munteanu Simina, 3d year, English-Comp. Lit.

Non-standard Englishes in writing

Non-standard English can be characterized as a substandard usage of the English language in

terms of grammar and spelling (in writing). Writers from both United Kingdom and United

States of America use non-standard English frequently, as they want to bring up in their texts and

local and regional flavours and to add more life and color to their characters' speech. Thus their

stories have an authentic and realistic feel to them. Relying on the reader response theories,

writers also use nonstandard English to show illiteracy and naivety among their characters, or

they use it as a source of humor and satire, or as a carrier of dramatic tension.

Some forms of non-standard English are dialects and accents, as well as slang and jargon. The

dialects and accents have no spelling rules, they are usually transcribed phonetically. Dropping

the "g" at the end of the words while the rest of the text is written in standard English can be

enough for the reader to identify the proper accent and dialect. In the following example from

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twin makes use of this to demonstrate the social distance and

difference between Huck and Jim.

"What's the matter with you, Jim? Have you been a-drinking?"

"Drinking? Has I ben a-drinkin'? Has I had a chance to be a-drinkin'?"

The dialect has to be one of the most powerful and common writing tool of characterization. It

demonstrates the social background and the regional location of any fictional characters. In texts
where you don't know who is talking, it can also demonstrates the age and sometimes the gender

of the speaker. In fact, the dialect can be defined as to write down sounds onto paper in order to

intentionally create an identity for the characters or to situate them with respect to their

geographic origin and position, social class, ethnicity, age and gender. For example, in

nineteenth century, the Black dialect was written almost exclusively by the dominant white

culture, and it was perceived as the white representation of black speech. The black dialect, along

with other dialects, was used to show racial inferiority.

One form of the written dialect is the "eye-dialect" which is non standard spelling that perfectly

represent standard pronunciation, and which looks like dialect but doesn't sound like one if read

aloud (fake dialect). The term "eye-dialect" was first coined in 1925 by the linguist George P.

Krapp in "The Psychology of Dialect Writing." "To the scientific student of speech these

misspellings of words universally pronounced the same way have no significance, but in the

literary dialect they serve a useful purpose as providing obvious hints that the general tone of the

speech is to be felt as something different from the tone of conventional speech." In the 1992

book "The Stuff of Literature", Edward A. Levenston says the eye-dialect "as a device for

revealing a character's social status", it "has a recognized place in the history of narrative

fiction." On broader and more common terms, the eye-dialect is used to show when the

characters are rude or bad-mannered, when they come from or currently are living in bad

environments, like gangster crowds or precarious neighborhoods. In American literature, the

eye-dialect used with a Southern accent, shows the character illiteracy or ignorance. On the other

side of the world, Charles Dickens may have used the eye-dialect more than any other well

known writer in English language, combining it with pronunciation spelling and non-standard

grammar in the speech of his characters, to show their lack of education and their position in the
social structure of the novel. One example of this can be found in Jo's dialogue from "Bleak

House":

"...there there wos other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed

as the t'other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded as to be a-talking to theirselves, or a-

passing blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin to us."

Some forms of nonstandard English, like the eye-dialect, if used excessively, can clog the

narrative of the text, making it hard to be comprehended and followed. But in the literary works

where they're used correctly, in the perfect amount, they give the characters an air of authenticity,

originality and reality, making them more relatable to the reader.

Bibliography

The Effectiveness of Using Non Standard English as a Technique in Writing Fiction Basing on
Ken Saro-wiwa’s Sozaboy and Brian Chikwava’s Harare North.

Writing in Dialect in Fiction: A History and Study by Jennifer Sommer

Wikipedia

Eye Dialect in Fictional Dialogue by Jane Raymond Walpole