This is a brief overview of "eye dialect" to be used in conjunction with study of the poem "An Ante-Bellum Sermon."

2. 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?

3. 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.

4. 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).

6. 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.

7. 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?

8. 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.

9. 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).

10. 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?

11. 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

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

13. 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.

14. 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