The term "eye dialect" has come to cover a range of non-standard spellings. At one end, we have a non-standard representation of a totally standard pronunciation, like "wuz" for "was" — and that's how the phrase's inventor, George Philip Krapp, meant "eye dialect" to be used: The impression of popular speech is easily produced by […]
It's a class-conscious respelling that's not used "to indicate that the speaker is uneducated or using colloquial, dialectal, or nonstandard speech". (Click on the image for a larger version, as usual.)
My original interest in the conversation behind yesterday's post "Our digital god is a CSV file?" was a sociophonetic one. As often noted, spontaneous speech often strays far from dictionary pronunciations, and Elon Musk's side of that conversation is full of interesting examples. A few are documented below.
Merriam-Webster's online dictionary entry for folx defines it as a re-spelling of folks "used especially to explicitly signal the inclusion of groups commonly marginalized". The etymology is given as "respelling of folks, with x after MX., LATINX". The entry also notes that the first known occurrence was in 1833, without clarifying that older uses (and many recent ones) are examples of […]
Linguists are generally scornful of "eye dialect", in both of the common meanings of that term: As an "unusual spelling intended to represent dialectal or colloquial idiosyncrasies of speech", like roight for right or yahd for yard; As a "the use of non-standard spellings such as enuff for enough or wuz for was, to indicate that the speaker is uneducated". The first kind […]
From Elmore Leonard, Raylan: A Novel (2012), a representation of the English immediate future marker as "on": Rita closed the door after him and locked it, hurried over to Mister, got her face down close to his and heard him breathe. She knew it. You don’t kill this dog with one shot. Rita said to […]
There's some interesting socio-politico-linguistic discussion, along with links to a lot more of the same, in Dylan Stableford's post "Was the Associated Press transcription of Obama’s CBC speech ‘racist’?", The Cutline 9/26/2011. I don't have time this morning to add significantly to this discussion, but in any case, I'd largely be recapitulating the material covered […]
Reader SL asks for intervention in an disagreement about whether newspapers should use "gonna" in quotations: I got in an argument with a colleague, who used to be a journalist, even, about this. She said there is nothing wrong with transcribing what someone says accurately. My point is that this is a clear case of […]
At the end of a recent post ("Opening up the Google-China mailbag", 1/14/2010), James Fallows adds this "language note": Usually when quoting reader responses, I leave them just as they are, warts and all. But if I am sure that the note is from a non-native speaker of English, I will sometimes correct small mistakes […]
John Bainbridge's 1961 book The super-Americans: a picture of life in the United States, as Brought into Focus, Bigger than Life, in the Land of the Millionaires — Texas was originally published as a series of articles in the New Yorker. The first installment (March 11, 1961: p. 47) began with this sentence: It is […]
Philip Gourevitch's "The State of Sarah Palin" (New Yorker, 22 September, p. 66-7) quotes from an interview with the vice-presidential candidate: "We're not just gonna concede to three big oil companies of this monopoly–Exxon, B.P., ConocoPhillips–and beg them to do this [build a natural gas pipeline] for Alaska," Palin told me last month in Juneau. […]
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Pretty much every time I post a Zippy cartoon (most recently, here), someone writes to ask about Bill Griffith's spelling of the definite article the as th', as in I know th' human being and th' fish can coexist peacefully! The question was asked in the comments on my posting "Are we snowcloning yet?" back […]
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