Article

Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 09 Dialect

When Lyddie arrives at the boarding house and the mill girls hear her speak, they criticize her language. But many of them also came from rural Vermont or the surrounding region. They understand her just fine! So why do they want her to change the way she talks?

To answer this question, we need to look carefully at what dialects communicate. Everyone speaks a dialect, or an accent. You, me, everyone! And no one ever “loses” a dialect, although they can change from using more of one dialect to using more of another. All dialects are equal in their ability to convey messages among their speakers. So, why do people change the way they speak? They change their speech because when we hear someone talk, we hear more than the message. We get information about where they grew up, their age, gender, race and ethnicity, and their education, to name a few. The mill girls want Lyddie to put more town and less country into her speech.

What was Lyddie doing that identified her as “country”? Paterson’s book gives several examples: she says “ain’t” instead of “not”, uses “creation” instead of “goodness” as an exclamation, and places “ey” at the ends of sentences, similar to adding “right?” or “you know?” She says “I come too late” rather than “I came too late”, and “I haven’t wrote them” rather than “I haven’t written them.” These are examples of slang terms or grammatical differences. The author Katherine Paterson probably used these examples because they are the most obvious (and easiest to spell!).

Lyddie probably also pronounced “kite” so it sounded more like “koyt” and “crowd” more like “kray-owd.” Other characters likely did too. Remember, Betsy’s voice is described as having “a bare trace of a Green Mountain twang?” She likely used many Vermont pronunciations but had changed some of her grammar and vocabulary.

All this is to say, again, that we all speak a dialect. We sometimes hear people talk about “good” or proper speech vs. “bad” or ungrammatical speech, but linguists believe all dialects follow grammatical rules and all are equally good—and equally good at communication. In certain social settings, however, some dialects signify more education and upward mobility than others. In addition, some features of dialects (usually grammatical differences and vocabulary) make a difference more than others in shaping this perception. Lyddie and the other factory workers learned to change aspects of their speech, along with their shoes and dresses, in order to become the educated factory girls they so wanted to be.