Eye dialect

In literature, eye dialect is the use of nonstandard spellings to indicate that a character speaks in a colloquial, dialectal, or uneducated way, often for comic effect. The spellings represent standard pronunciations (e.g. bloo for blue or enuff for enough) and the convention violated is thus "one of the eye, not of the ear".

The term was coined by George Philip Krapp in 1925. It is sometimes used more broadly to describe any attempt to represent nonstandard speech in spelling, whether or not the pronunciations indicated are standard.

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