An Examination Of Southern Dialect

An Examination of Southern Dialect

as Seen in the Works of William Faulkner

In the writings of William Faulkner, the reader may sense that the author has created an entire world, which directly reflects his own personal experience. Faulkner writes about the area in and around Mississippi, where he is from, during the post-Civil War period. It is most frequently Northern Mississippi that Faulkner uses for his literary territory, changing Oxford to "Jefferson" and Lafayette County to "Yoknapatawpha County," because it is here that he lived most of his life and wrote of the people he knew.

Faulkner's stories focus on the Southeastern United States at a time period when old traditions began to clash with new ideals. This is an era in American history with which most people can quickly identify, whether they are Southern or not. The South in Faulkner's works are complete with all the expected features: an agricultural society, Southern belles and gentlemen, racial tensions, and especially the common characteristics of Southern speech. Faulkner strays from the normal customs of Northern literature to present a realistic portrait of the South that he grew up in. In doing so, he comes up with an excellent sample of the Southern language, including linguistic qualities of both black and white speech. Faulkner establishes a unique literary voice which is recognizable due to variances from standard English in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammatical form, while juxtaposing speech elements foreign to anyone not familiar with Southern heritage.

The works of William Faulkner succeed in creating a literary dialect which is relatively consistent throughout all of his stories. A literary dialect is best defined as an "author's attempt to represent in writing a speech that is restricted regionally, socially, or both" (Ives 146). In Faulkner's writing, this can be described by such traits as an intentional misspelling, like "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 speaking. Such a case illustrates that Faulkner is well aware of the prestige norms that exist in Southern speech, and he takes advantage of this knowledge. As Feagin points out, in the Southeast, the way in which "nonstandard English is employed demonstrates a symbol of intimacy and local loyalty, as well as a gauge of the level of integration into a close-knit network" (Feagin 222).

Faulkner's characters reveal a tendency to speak in a slang-like or non-prescriptive grammar when they converse with other characters that they know well, often apparent in the form of jokes and metaphorical language. Similarly to the aristocratic speaker, the less educated Southern speaker often attempts to improve his or her speech when in a formal setting. McDavid asserts that the common way to do so is by "using bigger words and longer sentences, sometimes resulting in the ridiculous" ((2)McDavid 265). A good example of such in Faulkner occurs in As I Lay Dying when Anse, a rural, farming man, attempts to sound eloquent at a time of utmost solemnity. During a funeral speech, Anse states the following: The somebody you was young with and you growed old in her and she growed old in you, seeing the old coming on and it was the one somebody you could hear say it don't matter and know it was the truth outen the hard world and all a man's grief and trials ((1)Faulkner 511).

It is obvious that Anse intends to speak formally in this situation, thus Faulkner follows McDavid's rule of Southern speech about the elongation of sentences and its irregular result. This passage is successful in two ways. First, it reveals a realistic trait common in the Southeast, reflecting the solidarity norm based on local non-standard speech (Feagin 219). Second, it serves as a very powerful literary technique because the oration captures the high level of sincerity in the speaking character.

Another highly common form of Southern dialect which is often seen in Faulkner's writing is the presence of African American speech features. There are numerous examples of black speech in Faulkner that follow linguistic patterns. However, it is the purpose of this essay to view only a few of the most common. Alphonso Smith defines the most general rule of Southern Negro speech as the tendency to pronounce words like more, store, four, and floor without the /r/ sound, as in mo, sto, fo, and flo (Smith 365). Faulkner holds true to this generalization by narrating similar speech from the black characters in his books. For instance, in As I Lay Dying, the character Cash offers a statement which proves Faulkner's conformity to this black English norm when he says, "I ain't so sho that ere a man has the right to say what is crazy and what ain't"