The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn
A STUDY OF DIALECT
The Great Debate: Should the novel be taught in schools?
The “YES!” Side
The “NO WAY!” Side
 Dialectical accuracy of the
 Usage of the word “nigger” over
novel


The “n-word” is there for a reason!
Study of various dialects spoken in the
novel
 His portrayal of African-
Americans draws on actual
African tribal traditions
 Huck’s decision at the end of
shows he is one of the most
moral characters of the novel
219 times is offensive
 Portrayal of African-Americans
as “buffoons” and superstitious
fools (minstrel-like qualities)
 Huck is an immoral young boy
who is a bad example for youth
(he smokes a pipe at the age of
13! Gasp!)
Change for the Better or Worse?
 In 2/11 a new compilation edition of Huck Finn and The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer was released by New South
Books and removed all references to “nigger,” “Injun Joe,”
and “half-breed” to “slave,” “Indian Joe,” and “half-blood.”
 “[The] word is terrible, it’s hurtful, but it’s there for a reason to convey the
language and attitudes of Missouri in the 1840’s in a book written in the
1880’s when Jim Crow laws were being passed in the South to deprive blacks
of their civil rights.”
~ Jeff Nicols (Executive director of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut)
Terms to Know
 Orthography: the representation of the sounds of a
language by written or printed symbols
 Eye-dialect: the literary use of misspellings that are
intended to convey a speaker’s lack of education or
use of humorously dialectical pronunciations but
that are actually no more than respellings of
standard pronunciations
 Vernacular: the plain variety of language in everyday
use by ordinary people
Is there such thing as too much dialect?
 “Orthography overindulged is the least subtle way of
conveying identity in literature, and sometimes the most
offensive” (438).
 Eye-dialect should be “underground signifying,” or not
representing vernacular in a way that shows extreme errors
in standard spelling
 According to lingual analyst James Peterson, authors such
as Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright show the “less
is more” mentality: “They can thus convey the style and
language without making African-American Vernacular
English seem orthographically derivative or inferior” (440).
Reason for the Extreme Dialect
 Yes, Jim can be hard to understand at times
 Twain had to represent Jim (and other slaves) as
different, or the other.
 Extreme dialect because technically every character
speaks in some sort of dialect, and Jim has to be the
most different

Integral part of Jim’s identity! Huck accepts him as a friend
and even a father figure despite their differences
The Preface
 “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro
dialect; the extremist form of the backwoods South-Western dialect;
the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified versions of this
last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by
guesswork, but pains-takingly, and with trustworthy guidance and
support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I
make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers
would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and
not succeeding”
~ Mark Twain
WHAT?!
David Carkeet’s Explanation
 Twain Claims that there are 7 dialects (if he was
actually serious)
 Huck is the standard
 Dialects categorized into three factors: phonology
(organization of sounds), lexicon (vocabulary),
grammar
 Some problems


Wrote novel over a 7 year period (1876-1883)
Inconsistencies within characters’ speech
Carkeet’s Findings
 Missouri Negro: Jim and four other minor slaves
 Southwestern: Arkansas Gossips (Sister Hotchkiss et al)
 Ordinary Pike County: Huck, Tom, Aunt Polly, Ben Rodgers, Pap,
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Judith Loftus
Modified Pike County: Thieves on the Sir Walter Scott
Modified Pike County: King
Modified Pike County: Bricksville Loafers
Modified Pike County: Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas Phelps
This matches up with the preface!
Huck Finn and Candide
“I am persuaded that the future historian of America will find your words as
indispensible to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of
Voltaire.”
~ George Bernard Shaw to Mark Twain
“Candide, Voltaire’s young and absurdly innocent protagonist, has
absorbed, and keeps spouting the mantra of his teacher, Pangloss, that
‘this is the best of all possible worlds.’ Catastrophe after catastrophe
befalls Candide but he manically recites Pangloss’s ‘best of all possible
worlds’ philosophy until the idea is made to look utterly foolish” (Barlow
65).
Just like Candide, Huck spends the majority of the novel quoting the mantra
of his time period, that slaves are not real people. Just like Candide, that
idea is made to look “utterly foolish” as the novel progresses and Huck
finds a true friend in Jim.
Twain’s First Hand Knowledge of Dialect
 In order for satires to be efficient, they have to be historically accurate.
If Twain would have used a more ‘politically correct’ word such as slave,
it would not have been truly historically accurate, and therefore not
effective.
 What gave Twain his accurate dialectical knowledge?

If Twain owed a debt to anyone for the language in this book, it was to the people who
made up his boyhood world. He cannot have read this language anywhere, because no
writer before him had employed the argot of the uneducated types of people, black or
white, slave or free, who populate this book” (Barlow 68).
 “. . .Twain absorbed, consciously or unconsciously, Atlantic African
beliefs from several different sources. Within the black community,
childhood caretakers and associates introduced Twain to the
‘superstitions’ that Huck, his child-hero, would later share”
(Hildebrand 151).
The Portrayal of Jim
Accurate
Inaccurate
 Twain had an actual connection
 Twain portrays Jim as a
with slaves
 Jim is based on an actual slave
named Uncle Daniel
 Various other slaves such as
Uncle Ned, Jennie, Aunt
Hannah, and Aunty Cord
provided stories and African
folk beliefs to his stories
 Many “superstitious” incidents
in the novel are genuine beliefs
of African tribes
gullible, superstitious, and
stupid man who believes in
charms, ghosts, and fortune
telling.
 This portrayal makes him look
foolish and childlike.
 Twain and blackface minstrel
connection made Jim a “racist
caricature”
The Blending of Cultures
Yes, white culture affected slave culture
BUT slave culture also affected white
culture! This is shown in the behaviors
of Tom and Huck.
Huck’s Superstitions
“I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. . .I heard an owl, away off,
who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a
dog crying about somebody that was going to die. . .Pretty soon a spider
went crawling on my shoulder, and I flipped it off and it lit in the
candle; and before I could budge it was all shriveled up. I didn’t need
anybody to tell me that it was an awful bad sign and would fetch me
some bad luck, so I was scared and most shook the clothes off me. I got
up and turned around in my tracks three times and crossed
my breast every time; and then I tied up a little lock of my
hair with a thread to keep witches away. But I hadn’t no
confidence” (158).
Connection to African Tribes
 Bird Cries: northern Nigerians consider it a bad omen
 Dog Cries: west African tribes believe that jackals and wild dogs are
possessed while barking; the Igbo tribe believes dogs have the power of
clairvoyance
 Spider: the Berom tribe in central Nigeria believes each person has a
double that resides in a spider; Harriet Tubman used cobwebs for
medicinal purposes
 Witches: in the Congo, tribes believe witches have powers that center
on objects outside of the body and tying up a piece of hair can give one
power over them
Huck is “. . . one of the white characters most steeped in African cultural
knowledge.” This is interesting, as Huck, while he is the most similar
to African-Americans in his beliefs, is also the most sympathetic to
Jim’s plight as a slave (181).
Belief in Witches also has White Roots!
 King James I
 Jim’s belief in witchcraft
 Joan of Arc
does not make him a
“racist caricature”
because similar beliefs
are shown in Tom, Huck,
Pap, and other white
characters in the novel.
 This cultural exchange is
very important!
 Salem Witch Trials
 The Crucible
 The Scarlet Letter
To Conclude
 Presents a reaction to the
“politically correct”
version of the novel

Dialectical study
Preface
 A-prefixing
 Consistency of dialect
between characters


Putting aside myths about
previously “racist”
characters