Eye dialect

In literature, eye dialect is "the use of nonstandard spellings to indicate that a character speaks in a colloquial, dialectal, or uneducated way, often for comic effect." George Philip Krapp coined the term in The English Language in America (1925), and the strict sense he drew is narrow: the respellings, bloo for blue, enuff for enough, represent standard pronunciations, so the convention violated is one of the eye, not of the ear. The term is often widened to cover pronunciation spellings as well, dat for a genuinely nonstandard that, but the article keeps the distinction, because a mark on the page and a sound in the ear are different contracts with the reader.

The article's examples run from Jo in Dickens's Bleak House (wos, sed, wuns) to Al Capp's Li'l Abner, and E. E. Cummings's YgUDuh, which makes sense only when read aloud. The cautions are as developed as the device: critics including Denis R. Preston argue that such spellings denigrate the speaker, making a character appear boorish or uneducated rather than regional, and that consistent respelling can render a character's speech indecipherable. For novelists the working discipline is a light hand: mark rhythm and register at a few load-bearing words, and let free indirect discourse or plain syntax carry the rest, keeping the character's intelligence in the sentences rather than on the spelling.