Lesson plan
Eye dialect
In literature, eye dialect is the use of nonstandard spellings to indicate that a character speaks in a colloquial, dialectal, or uneducated way, often for comic effect. The spellings represent standard pronunciations (e.g. bloo for blue or enuff for enough) and the convention violated is thus "one of the eye, not of the ear". The term was coined by George Philip Krapp in 1925. It is sometimes used more broadly to describe any attempt to represent nonstandard speech in spelling, whether or not the pronunciations indicated are standard.
Article summary
In literature, eye dialect is the use of nonstandard spellings to indicate that a character speaks in a colloquial, dialectal, or uneducated way, often for comic effect. The spellings represent standard pronunciations (e.g. bloo for blue or enuff for enough) and the convention violated is thus "one of the eye, not of the ear". The term was coined by George Philip Krapp in 1925. It is sometimes used more broadly to describe any attempt to represent nonstandard speech in spelling, whether or not the pronunciations indicated are standard.
Key claims
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Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
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Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.