Language Variety in Literature

Overview

Geoffrey Chaucer is credited with legitimizing the use of English vernacular in the 14th century; thus, scholars have crowned him the “father of English literature.” In The Canterbury Tales, the more refined characters eloquently speak the king's English, while the working-class characters speak the local dialect. From the gallant knight to the widowed shrew, each character's social status and persona are defined by speech. Largely avoided during antebellum slavery except to characterize European culture, dialect became a popular tool among U.S. writers in the 19th century. Language variety has appeared in novels, poetry, comic strips, advertisements, and newsprint.

With the intention of creating authenticity or realism in literature, authors use language variety to illustrate the idioms of peoples from different regions, ethnicities, and social backgrounds; it has been used for satire, mimicry, acknowledgment, and scrutiny of other cultures. Interpretations of the U.S. southern drawl, urban slang, regional accents, and other varieties of English can be found in literature. Although scholars are unable to clearly define what is considered standard, writers have used dialect to differentiate between “proper” English and colloquialisms. Such differences in speech are often distinguished through spelling and syntax.

Collections of folktales, slave narratives, and stories regaling the South suggest more than a mere fascination with colorful phrases, stereotypes, and animated storytelling. Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others affected dialect in an effort to speak for the [Page 426]common folk. Dialect is a key component in literature, as it demonstrates that English is an ever-evolving language and not a stagnant form of speech originally brought to America from England. More importantly, literature is a gateway in which the use of language variety establishes the identity of a subculture or underrepresented group.

Types of Dialect Features

Transferring language onto paper requires more than an ear for the cadences and nuances of speech. Capturing dialect can prove to be an arduous task to take on in written form. Some words can be easily transformed by dropping the g and adding an apostrophe, for example, replacing doing with doin’. However, language variety can overwhelm a text when it is largely made up of dialect. Even simple sentences can interrupt the flow of the text if the reader has to decode its language. In the Uncle Remus tale, “The Wonderful Tar Baby Story,” readers unfamiliar with the interpretation of Black vernacular would find some of the text hard to decipher. In the following sentence, Uncle Remus describes Brer Rabbit as he walks right into Brer Fox's trap: En he didn't hatter wait long, nudder, kaze bimeby here come Brer Rabbit pacin’ down de road (And he didn't have to wait long, neither, because by and by here comes Brother Rabbit pacing down the road). In this instance, vernacular begins to sound like a foreign language. Joel Chandler Harris justified his use of Black dialect by claiming that the language the slaves used in his stories was 300 years old. Thus, he attributes the language of his Black characters to the tongue spoken in the early British colonies. In adopting this speech, he argued that he was preserving English dialect.

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