Dialect

                Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in part as an attempt to document and capture the lives of African-American men and women in the deep South. These people, having  remained in the South instead of emigrating to the North, and leaving much of their culture and tradition behind when they did emigrate to the city, existed in a world largely unseen by the average American reader. Hurston received funding to travel throughout the South and document their traditions, partially to preserve them for future generations and partially as material for her fiction. Their Eyes Were Watching God reflects many of these traditions, but the most instantly apparent and often confusing aspect of Southern life in this book is the pervasive use of dialect. The novel's characters speak quite fluently in vernacular, and the text depicts their often nonstandard grammar, accents, and complex idioms. Even the third person narrator takes on aspects of the vernacular at points during the book, when following characters particularly closely.

                The first question that Hurston's contemporary readers, and indeed many modern readers ask, is "Why dialect?" The contractions, omissions of letters, and word choices force the reader to analyze sentences audibly instead of visually, and many of the sayings are so obscure and removed from their meaning that they cannot be understood without close attention to context. At the beginning of the novel, the reader is almost instantly confused by the conversations, and must read them multiple times to figure out what the characters are saying and how they are saying it.

                However, by midway through the book, the dialect is almost unnoticeable. It seems almost as if the characters are speaking aloud in the reader's head, and most of the difficulties aforementioned have slipped away as the grammar has been seen to be consistent and the dialogue reflective of actual speech patterns. At some point, the dialect stops removing us from the scene and starts bringing us in closer, by creating a somewhat film-like attention to depict exactly what the characters are not saying, and not paraphrasing it in any way.

                Another example of a book which uses its own confusing lexicon is A Clockwork Orange. The protagonist and narrator, Alex, speaks in a British-Russian slang that employs religious use of Cockney rhyming slang, Russian loanwords. When the novel begins, the reader is literally incapable of understanding half of the words (most of the slang is not English), but the reader quickly catches on to the patterns of the language and by the end, the reader and the narrator are using the same vocabulary entirely. One side effect of this is that the protagonist, who is quite a morally reprehensible man, in some ways pulls us into his world and makes us understand him in a way that we would not if he were speaking standard English. A parallel can be drawn here with Their Eyes Were Watching God: Hurston's contemporaries, especially white ones, might not understand or be willing to immerse themselves in Southern black culture. By using dialect, the reader is implicitly drawn into the conversations the characters have, and by making the effort to learn the speech patterns and expressions, can identify with the characters more readily.

                Dialect also possesses another quality that must have appealed to Hurston. In many ways, the vernacular present in Southern communities is an artifact just as much as their folklore and customs are. As an anthropologist, Hurston made note of the games that the people played, the ceremonies for weddings and religion, and the stories that they told. If she wanted to fully capture the extent of Southern culture, representing the language that they spoke must have also been vital, for it is as likely to disappear as the other customs people leave behind when they leave the South. To preserve it, she likely felt it important to include the dialect in her novel. Their culture might have been preserved, but without the language, it would be almost impossible to place yourself in their shoes.