Dialect and accent in novels

Suzette Haden Elgin (ozarque) posted about her use of dialect in her blog, saying that what she posts is written in Ozark English. One anonymous reader responded that what Suzette posts didn't seem to be written in dialect, saying "When I think of dialect use in books, I think of something more like the character Joseph in Wuthering Heights, whose dialog is a chore to decode."

Suzette answered, in part, that "the characters in my Ozark Trilogy speak Urban Ozark, and I don't think reading that dialog is troublesome in the way that reading Joseph's dialog in Wuthering Heights is troublesome -- but I had to fight my copy-editors for every single "would of" and "could of" and "should of" from beginning to end."

Which caused me to think about the difference between dialect as portrayed in most 19th century novels, and dialect as portrayed in contemporary novels.

The difference between dialect in a novel like Wuthering Heights and dialect in Elgin's novels is that WH tried to represent the subtle phonetics of a dialect. Elgin's novels (wisely, I think) ignore most of the phonetics and instead focus on the syntactical differences. Possibly that's why the anonymous poster didn't think Elgin's books were written in dialect: "dialect" means to them "dialog with creative misspellings and lots of odd contractions."

The 18th and 19th century authors who first started using phonetic spellings and abundant contractions to represent dialect in dialog were nearly all well educated middle or upper class Standard English speakers. They tried very hard to represent exactly how they heard their servants talking in a way that their fellow middle and upper class readers would recognize as authentic. But nearly always, they didn't understand the dialectical rules being used by the people whose speech they were trying to convey. They interpreted what they heard not as a legitimate dialect but as "the way poor uneducated people who don't know better talk."

So on the one hand, these middle and upper class authors only heard those features of the lower class or regional dialect which were most obviously different from the Standard English of the time. On the other hand, they heard, and took pains to represent in detail, a lot of trivial differences in accent and pronunciation which, while spectacularly colorful, were not key features of the dialect.

And so we get passages like this (opening Wuthering Heights at random, this is from chapter 13, Joseph speaking):

"Gooid Lord! [...] If they's tuh be fresh ortherings -- just when Aw getten used tuh two maisters, if Aw mun hev a mistress set o'er my heead, it's loike time tuh be flitting. Aw never did think tuh say t'day ut Aw mud lave th' owld place -- but Aw daht it's nigh at hend!"

It's difficult for me as a reader to figure out what Joseph is saying because I have to spend so much time parsing his pronunciation. The fact that his rural Yorkshire speech also uses a different grammar than Catherine's Standard English gets lost along the way. I don't remember WH well enough to say if that alternative grammar is represented in a consistent way, but I doubt it. Unfortunately, representing the speech of poor or uneducated people like this became a rigid convention, so much so that even writers who were native speakers of a dialect ended up portraying that dialect in the same way upper class writers would.

For instance, Zora Neale Hurston. As a trained anthropologist, she probably had an excellent analytical understanding of the dialect of poor Southern Black people, and she was also definitely a native speaker of that dialect. Here's a bit at random from "Their Eyes Were Watching God," chapter 6 (Joe speaking):

You'se Mrs. Mayor Starks, Janie. I god, Ah can't see what uh woman uh yo' sability would want tuh be treasurin' all dat gum-grease from folks dat don't even own de house dey sleep in. 'Tain't no earthly use. They's jus' some puny humans playin' round de toes uh Time.

It's hard to convey the feel in just a brief quote, but reading the novel, you do get a sense that Hurston's characters don't just talk with an accent that's hard to read, they also use a different grammar, one with clear and consistent rules.

Because this way of conveying dialect has been so overused by upper class authors who are looking down their noses at how poor uneducated peons talk, it has also become a conventional way of connoting that a character is uneducated or stupid. So, thankfully, today writers who know a non-standard dialect no longer feel constrained to represent that dialect phonetically. Here's something at random from Nalo Hopkinson's "Brown Girl in the Ring" (chapter 5, Ti-Jeanne's grandmother talking):

"And so? Ain't you done left he already? Best thing you ever do. Live here with me and give your baby a good home. You could help me more with the healing and so. I go teach you what you need to know. For if Prince of Cemetery decide to ride you again before your head ready, I 'fraid you go go mad for true."

Hopkinson doesn't try to convey Mani's pronunciation except in one or two key places. As a reader, instead of having to spend my time figuring out what the hell is being said, or puzzling out how the character speaks their words, I can instead get a clear sense of what the character sounds like.