Some linguistic features of English varieties may come from stereotypes attached to the language itself, but to what extent it can be suggested that a dialect is being stereotyped? What signs can we identify as stereotypes when comes to a dialect?
Leigh (2012), in his article Fingerprinting the Literary Dialects of Three Works of Plantation Fiction, believed that it would be necessary a high knowledge of ‘textual manipulation’ to demonstrate the authenticity and stereotypes of a text. Groebner (2004) (as cited in Edwards, 2009) pointed out, that the issue of identity is important when analyzing the language. The word ‘identity’ can indirectly lead us into misconceptions since it is certainly true that a language has an identity based on several
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The answer may be found in Lavob’s A study of non-standard English: dialects in literature (1969), since he argued that dialects are highly stereotyped in literature because of two possible reasons:
1) The author wants to heighten or enrich the local flavour of speech.
2) The author hears this "marked" behaviour as invariant when in fact it is variable.
According to Lavob (1969), both reasons, even though they operate in relation to “variable rules” , they share a common goal which is the depiction of a dialect. The intention of the writer can be that of showing a specific regional accent, just for matters of style or to provide a different undertone to the characters in the novel, what make them fall into the social stereotypes that the readers will identify as belonging to a certain dialect (in this case the stereotypes have the purpose of being notice by the reader). He added that when the author is not a native speaker of a particular dialect “inconsistencies will appear in writing and the author 's own grammar will be shown without his realizing it” (showing features belonging to his own dialect and creating misunderstanding on the reader). He concluded his study of Non-standard English with the following