Paper Representations of the Non-Standard Voice

Abstract

People in the popular press as well as academia have some wrong ideas about how dialect renderings in literature evoke a non-standard voice. They think that graphic representations of dialect have a literal oral counterpart and that the worth of a dialect rendering lies in how accurately it depicts the spoken dialect in question. This paper demonstrates that linguistic accuracy is not and can never be a primary goal of writers who create effective renderings. The primary semiotic potential of dialect renderings lies in the indexical meaning they derive from their opposition to standard written English, rather than in linguistic detail. Consequently, whether a writer is a speaker of the dialect in question or not has little impact on the effectiveness of the literary dialect rendering. When the renderings of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white writers of dialect are compared with those of contemporary writers who purportedly speak the dialects in question, we see that though the authors of yesteryear and today often differ in the number and kind of features they choose to represent, neither can be said to be more accurate than the other.