He Said, She Said: An Exploration of the Use of Accents, Dialects, and Languages Throughout American Realist Novels

Abstract

One of American Realism’s defining characteristics lies in the authors’ ability to realistically mimic an accent, dialect, or language of a person or group of people. Through the capture of the spoken word, authors use this unique style of writing to create a specialized persona for a character. Accents and dialects (or the lack of) allow the author to shape the readers’ perspective of a character by distinguishing their class, region, race, gender and/or their intellect for political, social, or personal gain. The integration of different languages into a text validates and/or complicates a country’s language and culture since it forces the reader to have an understanding of the language to completely read the text.