The Afro-American dialect used by two main characters of black woman in Stockett's the help

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Sulistianingseh, Sulistianingseh (2018) The Afro-American dialect used by two main characters of black woman in Stockett's the help. Undergraduate thesis, UIN Sunan Ampel Surabaya.

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Abstract

This study discusses how dialectal speech is reflected in written text. The main interest of this study is the exploration of the use of African American Vernacular English in written literature in American novel; The Help (2009) by Kathrin Stockett as a field of investigation. There are two research problems proposed in this study; what are the patterns of dialect used by Aibileen and Minny in the novel of The Help? And what are the cultural elements reflected in Aibileen’s and Minny’s utterances in The Help? The method that is used in this study is qualitative research using the technique of content analysis. This method is chosen since it is suitable to uncover the pattern of AAVE and the cultural element inside it. Thus, the writer read the novel especially the text related to Aibileen’s and Minny’s utterances from the first until the sixteenth chapters as the data of this study. The analysis of the AAVE pattern uses the theory of AAVE by Peterson in Karvonen (2009) while the cultural element is in Iles (2014). The result of this study shows that AAVE patterns do not appear all in the text.Firstly; there are ten grammatical patterns in this study from the eleven grammatical patterns in Peterson theory. Secondly in phonological features, from the two features that are accessible to find in a written form; the unstressed syllable deletion and initial th change, the writer just finds one feature that is the unstressed syllable deletion. Thirdly, in the vocabulary variation, the writer finds four words that indicate as AAVE unique dialect such like “whack”, “spec”, “Sho nuff”, and “doo-doo”. In conclusion, Aibileen possesses more dialect characteristics than Minny. All the features appear 157 times in Aibileen utterances while those appear 113 times in Minny’s utterance. The second discussion, the representation of cultural elements in The Help shows that from six cultural elements in Iles (2014) the writer just finds four cultural elements; riddles, sorcery, anecdotes, and saying. The most often apparent feature of cultural element that exists in ‘The Help’ is saying since it is used by Stockett in The Help to reveal the folkloric belief. All in all AAVE dialect can be applied in the novel and it can be identified not only in spoken but also in written. Furthermore, the discussion of cultural elements in this study can provide the cultural background of the user and social parameters that characterize the dialect user as gender, age, and social status.