'It's hard fuh me to understand what you mean,de way you tell it': representing language in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God

Abstract

In this article I wish to focus on Zora Neale Hurston's dialectal writing, specifically looking at what particular features characterize the language portrayed in Their Eyes Were Watching God via phonetic respellings; and whether or not these features are incorporated into the language of the text in an authentic and consistent manner. Thus I consider whether or not the respellings convincingly capture features of southern American English and AAVE, or if they simply represent stylistic devices employed by Hurston to mark the speech of her characters in a purely fictional manner. With respect to the text under consideration here, I will argue that the majority of Hurston's respellings do, in fact, indicate important phonetic and phonological differences in pronunciation that reflect features typical of both southern American English and AAVE. Furthermore, her use of 'nonstandard' grammatical constructions reinforces the linguistic authenticity of her representation of a dialectal variety particular to African-Americans living in the Southern United States.