The Goophered Grapevine

Dialect is an effort to represent the specific characteristics of a nonstandard spoken variant of a language in written form. Writers may represent nonstandard English by spelling certain words phonetically, including words that only appear in the dialect, the addition or elision of letters, or through the use of punctuation like apostrophes. Words in dialect may or may not be arranged in sentences with a standard structure.

In “The Goophered Grapevine,” Julius McAdoo’s speech is always represented in dialect and serves as a part of his characterization as a Southerner and a slave.

For example, Chesnutt represents Julius McAdoo’s first line of dialogue like this: “Yas, suh. I lives des ober yander, behine de nex san'-hill, on do Lumberton Plank-road” (par. 8, line 1).In this line, Chesnutt uses coined spellings (e.g. “suh” for “sir” and “ober” for “over”) to represent the sound of Julius’s deep Southern accentand an atypically-conjugated verb (e.g. “I lives” instead of “I live”) to represent Julius’s use of African-American Vernacular English, a variant of English spoken by some African-Americans. Nevertheless, the sentence structure is fairly standard American English.

Dialect like this was frequently used in regional literature as local color, as representation of cultural and linguistic traits specific to a region,and to make the story more realistic or entertaining for readers who might have been unfamiliar with the region.