An Examination Of Southern Dialect

10 Pages 2574 Words

ike “marster” for master, or in the use of “Miss” along with the given first name of a female, as in “Miss Corrie.” These, amongst countless other examples, are distinctly Southern speech traditions. Anyone not from the South may need explanations of much of Faulkner’s pronunciations, words, usages, and language customs which the author himself takes for granted. Because Faulkner has employed such a vast and complex Southern dialect in his stories, the language he uses has become a microcosm of Southern language as a whole. As one critic has noted, “local forms of speech maintain one’s individual dignity in a homogenizing world” (Burkett vii).

In Faulkner, this local speech is a mixture of “Southern American and Negro dialogue with all the folklore from Virginia to Louisiana, Florida to Texas” (Brown 2). Faulkner’s dialect is effective both as a literary device and as a link between the American English language and American culture and history, specifically in the Southeast.

The South is probably the most linguistically diversified part of the nation. Blacks and whites from Atlanta to Charleston to Nashville speak a different form of standard English in a different version of the Southern accent. Part of this linguistic diversity is reflected in the way that the Southern aristocracy can “shift not only vocabulary and pronunciation, but even grammar, according to the audience” ((1)McDavid 219). This technique is very much alive in Faulkner’s work. For example, in The Reivers, the upper-class grandfather character Boss is an educated man of high social standing in the community. Yet, when he is in the company of only his grandson Lucius, as part of a lecture, he says “the safe things ain’t always the best things” ((2)Faulkner 117). Throughout the book, Boss’s speech moves from the formal to the informal, largely depending on the intimacy he feels with the person or persons to whom he is spe...