Eye Dialect - Examples in English

Examples in English

Charles Dickens may have used eye dialect more than any other author in English, combining it with pronunciation spelling and nonstandard grammar in the speech of his uneducated characters. An example in Bleak House is dialogue spoken by Jo, the miserable boy who sweeps a path across a street:

...there wos other genlmen come down Tom-all-Alone's a-prayin, but they all mostly sed as the t'other wuns prayed wrong, and all mostly sounded as to be a-talking to theirselves, or a-passing blame on the t'others, and not a-talkin to us.

Here wos, sed, and wuns indicate standard pronunciations.

In contemporary novels, eye dialect can be found in Forrest Gump (by Winston Groom) and The Help (by Kathryn Stockett).

The American cartoonist Al Capp frequently combined eye dialect with pronunciation spelling in his strip "Li'l Abner". Examples include lissen, aristocratick, mountin, correkt, feends, hed, introduckshun, leppard, and perhaps the most common, enuff. Only his rustic characters are given these spellings; for instance, the "overcivilized" Bounder J. Roundheels's dialogue contains gourmets, while Li'l Abner's contains goormays.

In his Discworld series, Terry Pratchett makes extensive use of eye dialect to extend the caricature of his characters, even going to the point of changing the font used for certain dialog. Death, for example, speaks in small capitals, while the dialog of a golem who can only communicate by writing resembles Hebrew script, in reference to the origins of the golem legend. Eye dialect is also used to establish a medieval setting, wherein many characters' grasp of spelling is heavily based on phonetics.

Cartoonist Walt Kelly used eye dialect for most of the characters in his classic comic strip, Pogo, and, like Pratchett afterward, used unique fonts for many of his supporting cast.

Many cartoonists and comic book creators eschew phonetic eye dialects in favor of font changes or distinctive speech balloons -- Swamp Thing, for example, has traditionally been depicted using "crusty" yellow speech balloons and dialogue heavily laced with ellipses, suggesting a gravelly voice that only speaks with great effort. Robotic and computer characters often use square speech balloons and angular fonts reminiscent of OCR-A, suggesting a stilted, emotionless cadence. An example of a comic that does both is The Order of the Stick, where some characters (particularly ones that are unusual in some way, such as being undead or from another plane of existence) will have oddly colored word bubbles, whereas Dwarves speak with eye dialect.