deliberate misspellings

[Dennis R. Preston]

Look at Journal of Sociolinguistics 4/4, a special issue on
nonstandard orthography.

dInIs



>Has anyone written about deliberate misspellings and letter
>substitutions, especially in Hip Hop-influenced culture? I'm not
>asking about "eye dialect" (at least I don't think I am), but
>rather, for example, about substituting Z for S (skillz, boyz) and
>other kinds of respellings (stoopid, sucka). Companies have been
>doing this for years to gain attention (from Beanz Meanz Heinz to
>Miller Lite), but has anyone looked into the history of deliberate
>misspellings in Hip Hop and possibly in earlier AAVE?

--
Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736