| Another gem from A.Word.A.Day, eye dialect was first used by George Krapp in The English Language in America (1925) to refer to non-standard spellings in which, as Krapp put it, "the convention violated is one of the eyes, not of the ear." Examples of eye dialect may be misspellings which represent youthful or uneducated speech ("enuff" for enough, "wuz" for was, "warez" for wares etc); or may reflect different, especially colloquial, pronounciations ("Strine" for Australian, "Canajun" for Canadian, "Murrican" for American etc). Though not mentioned by my sources, eye dialects may have a political intent as well - "womyn" or "wymyn", say, adopted by some feminists to avoid including the word man in the word woman. |
