A "Voices from the Field" essay for chapter 9 of Katherine Paterson's novel Lyddie*, from Lowell National Historical Park's Books to Parks series, by Dr. Julie Roberts, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Vermont.*
When Lyddie reaches the boardinghouse and the other mill girls hear her talk, they find fault with the way she speaks. Yet many of them came from rural Vermont or nearby themselves, and they understand her perfectly well. So why do they want her to change?
Everyone has a dialect
Roberts's answer starts with what a dialect tells a listener. Everyone speaks a dialect, or has an accent — every one of us. Nobody ever truly "loses" a dialect, though people can shift from using more of one to using more of another. And every dialect is equally able to carry meaning between the people who speak it.
People change how they speak because speech carries more than its message. When we hear someone talk, we also pick up clues about where they grew up, their age, gender, race and ethnicity, and their education, among other things. The mill girls want Lyddie to sound more like the town and less like the country.
What marked Lyddie as "country"
Paterson gives several examples of Lyddie's speech:
| Lyddie says | Instead of |
|---|---|
| "ain't" | "not" |
| "creation!" as an exclamation | "goodness!" |
| "ey" at the end of a sentence | something like "right?" or "you know?" |
| "I come too late" | "I came too late" |
| "I haven't wrote them" | "I haven't written them" |
These are differences of vocabulary and grammar. Roberts suggests Paterson probably chose them because they are the most noticeable — and the easiest to spell.
Lyddie probably also said "kite" so that it sounded more like "koyt", and "crowd" more like "kray-owd", and other characters likely did the same. The novel says Betsy's voice keeps just a hint of a Green Mountain twang: she probably kept many Vermont pronunciations while changing some of her grammar and vocabulary.
"Good" and "bad" speech
People sometimes talk about "good", proper speech and "bad", ungrammatical speech. Linguists, Roberts explains, hold that every dialect follows grammatical rules, and that all are equally good, and equally good at communicating.
In some social settings, though, certain dialects signal more education and upward mobility than others, and some features — usually grammar and vocabulary — count for more than others in creating that impression. So Lyddie and the other factory workers learned to change parts of their speech, along with their shoes and dresses, to become the educated factory girls they wanted to be.
Sources
- Julie Roberts, "Lyddie: Voices from the Field - Chapter 09 Dialect", Lowell National Historical Park, National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/lyddie-voices-dialect.htm
- The cover is a postcard of a Lowell weave room shown in the park's companion article for chapter 10. The source page's portrait of the author is not reproduced.
- Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
In these publicationsLowell National Historical Park
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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