Their Eyes Were Watching God Natural Dialect

American author Zora Neale Hurston was a profound author in the mid-1930s. As a young black girl, growing up was not easy for Zora. She experienced racism, debt, the loss of her mother, and poverty. Despite all the struggles she had to face, Zora was determined to make a name for herself. She did just that by writing the iconic book “Their Eyes Were Watching God” in 1937 which is said to be a classic piece for the Harlem Renaissance. This book, which was mentioned above, was written in the 1930s by a young black author with a lot of natural speaking. Zora wrote as she spoke which is different from Standard American English because it better got her point across. Her entire novel is filled with natural dialect which makes her a notorious author.

De booger man might ketch yuh.” (Hurston 26.) This sentence is a hard one to read if someone only knew Standard American English. This sentence would read something like “Oh, Phoeby, if you are ready to go, I could walk over there with you, it is getting dark. The boogie man might catch you” once all the dialect that Zora added was removed. The variations in pronunciations throughout any form of dialect allow for authors to add their own personal connection and touch into the book to make it more of their own. Different from Standard American English, most words do not have any slang whereas dialect will. In the sentence above “duskin’ down dark” literately means that the sun is setting, or it is dark outside but Zora’s dialect let her rephrase a common phrase to add her own personal connection to it. Pronouns also change in this dialect from that of Standard American English, where one would say “I” the dialect that Zora uses is “Ah” instead. As mentioned, she writes as she speaks to give her own personal connection to this novel. The Linguistic Society of America describes African American English as “Ebonics pronunciation includes features like the omission of the final consonant in words like 'past' (pas' ) and 'hand' (han'), the pronunciation of the th in 'bath' as t (bat) or f (baf),

According to Artemis Alexiadou with Frontiers “Language mixing is a ubiquitous phenomenon characterizing bilingual speakers. A frequent context where two languages are mixed is the word-internal level, demonstrating how tightly integrated the two grammars are in the mind of a speaker and how they adapt to each other.” (Alexiadou.) This would explain why throughout the novel Zora uses a combination of words to get her points across. She has adapted to different sayings, dialects, and cultures which in turn would explain the word