Huck Doesn't Sound like Himself: Consistency in the Literary Dialect of Mark Twain

Abstract

Mark Twain is one of the most prolific writers of literary dialect, and his works have long been studied not only for their content but also for the structure of the language found within. In this tradition, this article analyzes the speech of the character of Huck Finn in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. However, this article moves beyond traditional studies which focus on cataloguing dialect features or discussing the writer's dialect accuracy, and instead questions whether or not Twain was consistent in his use of literary dialect intertextually. Using the LinguaLinks program, a representative sample of Huck's speech from each text was examined for non-standard features and dialect spellings, and these forms were analyzed for consistency of use. This study reveals that while Twain is consistent in some of the dialect features analyzed, variation does in fact occur within his representation of Huck's speech.