UCLA

The study and characterization of the literary uses of non-standard AmericanEnglish writing systems was once a topic of research central to the study of American literature. Speech as Writing: Literary Dialect Orthography in the United States 1790-1930 argues that the emergence of new computational tools and theoretical insights enables a return to the general study of at least one common component of literary dialect – non-standard orthography. The use of non-standard orthographic systems in crafting dialect literature differs from the use of non-standard syntax or vocabulary in that it presents a full system of meaning independent from the encoding facet of orthography typically explored by linguistics or cognitive science. "Speech as Writing" employs these insights alongside a computational methodology drawn from corpus linguistics and information theory to explore how this novel understanding of orthography can contribute to novel understandings of nineteenth and early twentieth-century United States literature.