A Basic Overview of Eye Dialect

Look at the poem.

0What patterns did you notice in spellings?0What patterns did you notice in pronunciations?

0 Can you make some generalizations about this dialect?

A little history

0 “Eye dialect” was first named such in 1925 by George P. Krapp in The English Language in America

0The term was used to describe unconventional spellings in an attempt to represent how a particular group of people speak.

0Krapp says, “the convention violated is one of the eyes, and not of the ear.”

0Authors use it to show how certain characters in certain areas or groups speak.

Definition

0Paul Hudd Bowdrey Jr. (who wrote a thesis on the topic) defines this dialect as:0 “…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).

Basic Features

Don’t get stressed…

0Many words are said differently when they are stressed verses when they’re unstressed.

0Spelling the unstressed form is a typical feature of eye-dialect.

Some examples:

0 fer/for: What are you screamin’ fer?0 ter/to: Come tur my house.0yer/your: That's yer problem.0bin/been: Where you bin?

Shortening

0deleted “h”: Take 'im with you.0 ‘em/them: I told 'em I to go home.0d'you/do you': What d'you mean by that?0gonna/going to: You gonna go tonight? 0outta/out of: Get outta here!0kinda/kind of: What kinda answer is that?0 sort've or sorta/sort of: It’s sorta funny.0Wanna/want to: I don't wanna know the answer.

Alternative spellings

0Eye dialect also involves spelling words as they sound; most of these could not be pronounced in any other way.

0Eye dialect is just as much about the eye (the way words look) as the ear (the way that look matches with real sounds).

Some examples:

0 jest/just: She was jest leavin’. 0woz/was: It woz a great day.0 shore/sure: Are you shore about that?

0 What other examples can you find in the poem?

Deletion of consonants

0Words ending in -ing are shortened to –in’0 Meeting becomes meetin’

0Of becomes, simply, ‘o0Strings of three consonants are eliminated by

deletion, vowel addition, or rearranging 0This is called “consonant cluster reduction” and

happens naturally, all the time0 Children becomes childern 0 Hundred becomes hunderd

Slang terms

0As with any dialect, eye dialect also involves special words (slang) for particular expressions.

Some examples:

0 “Whose only bugbear seemed to be…” 0 “It tickled me all over”0 “We’d jine our lots”

0 Using context clues, determine what these may mean.

Sources

0To read more, check out these two sites:0http://

ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/00/09/79/22/00001/studyofeyedialec00bowdrich.pdf

0http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SpellingNovel/EyeDialect.htm

0http://www.uniss.it/lingue/annali_file/vol_6/4_Brett_Lost.pdf