Sociolinguistic Artifacts

This links to an excerpt from Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God", which we are reading in Hum 110. (Spoiler warning.) In the excerpt, the white doctor talking to the Black main character style-shifts from a Southern dialect to a non-Southern dialect as he conveys, perhaps, graveness, expertise, or professionalism. This change is shown through changes in how his dialogue is transcribed. Hurston was trained in anthropology and studied under Franz Boas as well as doing fieldwork in the South, so she probably would have knowledge, direct experience, or both, of this phenomenon. [Published on 1937]