Eye Dialect(시각 방언) = 시각을 사로잡는 방언

[살점]

시각 방언 (Eye dialect)

시각 방언 이란 조지 필립 크라프가 만든 조어이다. "says"를 "sez"로, "women"을 "wimmin"으로 쓰는 등 발음이 나는 대로 표기하는 현상을 말한다. 

Why It’s Called Eye Dialect

After examining the quotes below, have you guessed why it’s called eye dialect? This nonstandard spelling engages your eyes. It stands out and catches your attention.





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What Is Eye Dialect?

Shundalyn Allen

Updated on November 25, 2016 · Grammar

Eye dialect uses misspellings intentionally to suggest something about the speaker.

What Is Eye Dialect?

When you think of dialect, usually you think of the way a person speaks. When English is not someone’s first language, or when they come from a region or group that has its own style of pronunciation, they may speak quite differently from the majority. “Eye dialect” reflects these dialectical differences in the spelling of words. The term appeared first in The English Language in America, published in 1925.

Examples of Eye Dialect

What’s all the w-u-u-rld to a man when his wife is a widdy?

George Washington Sears, Woodcraft and Camping

“Go on, Professor Grace!” he said, wide-eyed. “I wanna get an A on the test.”

Rick Riordan, The House of Hades

Cuz how do you know yer alive if you don’t hurt?

Patrick Ness, The Ask and the Answer

In the first example, the author spells world with U’s and hyphens to indicate that the sound is drawn out. Widdy is how the writer represents speaker’s pronunciation of widow. The second two examples reflect pronunciations that may be quite familiar to you. Do you know anyone who says wanna instead of want to? How about cuz instead of because and yer instead of you are? How would they feel if you represented their speech patterns with these spellings?

Why Eye Dialect Is Controversial

Therein lies the danger. Spellings like enuff for enough, for example, set a character apart from others. Someone might assume that the writer thinks the speaker is uneducated, behind the times, or worse. In The Stuff of Literature, Edward A. Levenston says that readers often associate eye dialect with “a character’s social status,” but he acknowledges that it does have “a recognized place in the history of narrative fiction.”
A good example is the Li’l Abner comic series by Al Capp. The series began in 1909. Li’l Abner, the main character, is a simple-minded rustic character whose speech contains phrases like “Ah is still alive.” (Ah stands for I.) Other characters in the same comic strip are genteel, and the spelling of their speech reflects it. For example, the dialogue of Bounder J. Roundheels usually reflects standard spellings.
If you do use eye dialect in your writing, proceed with caution. Some phrases like wanna and gonna are so common that they will probably cause little if any controversy. However, if you portray the speech of a certain ethnic group or social class with nonstandard pronunciation, you run the risk of causing offense. Of course, eye dialect would usually be best avoided in formal or business writing.

Why It’s Called Eye Dialect

After examining the quotes above, have you guessed why it’s called eye dialect? This nonstandard spelling engages your eyes. It stands out and catches your attention.


Normally, misspellings are intentionally avoided, but with eye dialect the opposite is true. These intentional misspellings may reflect dialects or standard pronunciation. However, eye dialect can be controversial because it sometimes plays on stereotypes that may be offensive to some readers. Have you ever noticed that when you learn something new, you start to encounter examples of it all around you? Keep your eyes open for eye dialect! You will be surprised how much you find.

Your writing, at its best.




 A basic overview of eye dialect

1. Look at the poem.

0 What patterns did you notice in spellings?
0 What patterns did you notice in pronunciations?
0 Can you make some generalizations about this dialect?

2. A little history

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

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

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

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

3. Definition

0 Paul 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).

4. Don’t get stressed…

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

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

5. Some examples:

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

6. Shortening

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

7. Alternative spellings
0 Eye dialect also involves spelling words as they sound; most of these could not be pronounced in any other way.
0 Eye dialect is just as much about the eye (the way words look) as the ear (the way that look matches with real sounds).

8. Some examples:
0 jest/just: She was jest leavin’.
0 woz/was: It woz a great day.
0 shore/sure: Are you shore about that?
0 What other examples can you find in the poem?

9. Deletion of consonants
0 Words ending in -ing are shortened to –in’
0 Meeting becomes meetin’
0 Of becomes, simply, ‘o
0 Strings of three consonants are eliminated by deletion, vowel addition, or rearranging
0 This is called “consonant cluster reduction” and happens naturally, all the time
0 Children becomes childern
0 Hundred becomes hunderd

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

11. 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.

12. Sources

0 To read more, check out these two sites:


0 http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/00/09/79/22/00 001/studyofeyedialec00bowdrich.pdf

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

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