ABSTRACT
The (re-)creation or (re-)construction of speech in the written text has long been a central issue in literary research. When studying literary dialect, diachronic studies can throw light on the developments of dialectal features by looking at written sources, whereas the synchronic study of different varieties of English allows the reader to compare written and spoken corpora. There are several ways of developing written corpora. One of the first questions the researcher must ask when considering speech representation in literature is whose speech is worth analyzing. The appearance or absence of a particular feature in the work of an author may be due to their personal style, and this is something that researchers interested in corpus analysis of the kind discussed need to take into account. Returning to case study of the representation of Irish English, it is worth taking into account that authors sometimes mark different dialects orthographically in order to render pronunciation.
