ABSTRACT

To set the stage, it is important to distinguish between true ‘eye dialect’ and pronunciation respellings. The former, though resorting to non-standard respelling, such as <wuz> for was, corresponds to no real change in standard pronunciation (at least in the American context). The latter employs respelling to represent actual differential pronunciation, such as stop-initial <dat> for that. However, the term ‘eye dialect’ is often used quite loosely to subsume both, as in the multivolume Accents of English (Wells 1982) and in the public access site Wiktionary where the entry for eye dialect reads as follows: ‘English spellings that are intentionally incorrect, to convey a particular pronunciation’. More accurately, Schneider (2011: 92–93) observes that a characteristic of:

dialect writing is that there is a whole lot of so-called “eye-dialect”: spellings which look strange but which on closer inspection do not signal a pronunciation deviant from general norms, as in introducshun, iz, uv, wuz, sed, frum, mite, and also, of course, suthern. 1