Dialect Use in the Victorian Novel Dickens’s Hard Times and Eliot’s Silas Marner

Abstract

Dialect is used in British literature at both artistic and technical levels to echo different voices from multiple domains of life powerfully traced in the novel; dialect also lets to achieve the objective of authenticity and truth of art that novelists set up in the imaginative world of the reader. The use of dialect in literature has a function, especially in the novel, so that to provide realism, social and historical accuracy. Thus, the research purposes to examine data from literature taking into account the linguistic research methods for language variation in novels; it targets on exposing the technique of writing some of the utterances that are not obedient to the norms of the standard; however, they are required in highly standard writings mostly when characters communicate between each other. The problem of dialect use in the novel crops up in various disciplines to entangle different approaches that part of them has been adopted within the scope of such research. Said differently, the research objective targets at finding out the nature of language used in literature from different disciplines mainly sociolinguistics and dialectology i.e. analytical study of chunks of speech made to action by characters who contribute to interweave the plot in the novel.