Eye dialect

Common card · No. 233307

Eye dialect is the literary device of using deliberately nonstandard spelling. Typically the purpose of eye dialect is to more phonetically reflect pronunciations or, most commonly, to portray informal or nonstandard language usage. Eye dialect is often a shorthand way for an author to indicate, through a character's language, that the character is lower-class or uneducated, sometimes for comedic effect. The spellings may even 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.

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