Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from October, 2018

Dialects in Literature

In the most recent novel we are reading in class, Their Eyes Were Watching God , the characters all speak in a distinct dialect of English that is non-standard. "I" is changed to "Ah", verbs are shortened, there are double negatives, and so on. Though for some this may be hard to read and understand, especially in a book where most of the story is delivered through dialogue, but I feel that these kinds of literary quirks can really differentiate a story. Not just in a narrative about African Americans, but in other literature with other English dialects. People can usually tell the difference between British English and American Standard English when spoken, but when written as dialogue they very rarely show any of the differences in the dialects. Given, those two are very similar but the same kind of logic can be applied to other dialects of English. Authors usually wrote their dialogue in standard, and they would use a different dialect if the character was "