Their Eyes Were Watching God: Dialect 3 key examples

One of the ways the reader sees this is through Jody's smooth, clever turns of phrase. Once he gets to Green Cove Springs, he starts to try to convince the people already living there that they ought to build an all-Black town. He then uses this rather funny idiom: "You cannot have no town without some land to build it on. Y'all ain't got enough here to cuss a cat on without gittin' yo mouf full of hair." This phrase ("so small you can't cuss a cat without getting your mouth full of hair") was common throughout the south in the 1930s.

Still, it is quite a descriptive phrase, so Starks shows his flair for dramatic oratory with this idiom. It also is simply a good way to describe that the surrounding land is small. Instead of a narrator simply saying that there was little land to build on, Hurston has a character describe that fact to the reader through a succinct and funny statement, much more enjoyable to read. It helps to characterize both Starks and the new town.

And Joe's dialect is distinct: he is a little closer to standard English, using "cannot" instead of "can't" and has fewer distinctive pronunciations. In doing so, Joe is trying to seem professional by emulating white styles of speaking, to assert a sort of power over the people living where he wants to build a town. This statement quickly builds background for both Joe and the new town, on several levels.

Nanny's dialect here is quite thick, especially in comparison to Janie's. Nanny uses "d" where other speakers, especially Janie, use "th" (see, for instance, "Don't set dere wid yo' head hung down"). Nanny's speech, more heavily inflected speech with southern Black dialect, is a reflection of her more traditional values. In between Nanny's description of her distaste for Johnny Taylor are Janie's thoughts on the matter: "Nanny's words made Janie's kiss across the gatepost seem like a manure pile after rain." The focus in this line on "Nanny's words" shows that Janie disagrees not only with what Nanny is saying, but the way she says it. The dialect, here, helps to accentuate the difference between Janie and Nanny.

There is an interesting contrast here between Janie's speech and that of the narrator. In standard English, the narrator describes Janie's life, that she feels like "a great tree in leaf." This represents a full understanding of Janie's whole life and her perception of it; it is communicated to the reader in standard English. This story of Janie's life is the content of the story which she is about to tell to Pheoby; it is "exactly what Ah got to tell yuh." Janie tells Pheoby that she doesn't know how to tell her story, but the standard-English narrator summarizes it quickly in one quick metaphor. Exactly who this narrator is remains unclear in the story. This tension in how the story is told, with Janie's story, usually in dialect, interspersed with gaps filled in by a seemingly omniscient standard-English narrator, carries through the book. It is perhaps this tension that Hurston alludes to when Janie says that "it's hard to know where to start at." Janie begins her speech not sure of her story, even if the narrator is, in standard English.