eye-dialect

[Laurence Horn]

>>Eye-dialect refers to spellings which do not indicate any actual
>>change in  the way words are pronounced. The best example is "sez."
>>Of course, everybody says "sez" (except people who haven't learned
>>English yet, with apologies to those who speak dialects with minor
>>variations in the mid-front lax vowel). Eye-dialect is there to
>>simply give "flavor" to the speaker (and, as I have shown in several
>>articles, that flavor is always status- and intellegence-lowering).

Another good example is "wuz", as in "We wuz robbed!".  (Try saying
it in a way that DOESN'T correspond to "wuz".)  A more interesting
example is "luv", which at one point gave birth to a new lexical item
and a '60's play and movie of the same name (and spelling) that I
never saw.  Yes, there's also a pronunciation in parts of Britain in
which the vowel is back and round rather than a wedge or schwa, but
that's not what the "luv" spellling represented.  But I'm not sure it
was simply status- and intelligence-lowering in this case.  More
register-lowering, perhaps.

larry