Exploring Authenticity and Literary Dialect from a New Perspective

This paper presents a theoretical discussion of literary dialect and authenticity and proposes a new approach that will enhance our knowledge of these concepts. It reveals the existence of a gap in the study of literary dialect and authenticity, where most researchers have paid attention to the role of the writer/creator while leaving aside the reader/audience. Scholars interested in the authenticity of literary dialect have traditionally concentrated on assessing how closely literary dialects resemble real-world dialects. However, the idea that authenticity only depends on the linguistic accuracy that the writer/creator lends to the fictional portrayal of dialect has been abandoned. More recent studies have started to examine how readers/audiences authenticate (or deauthenticate) dialect representations. Their focus is on which readers/audiences evaluate a portrayal as authentic and why. This paper is in line with the view that authenticity depends on the readers’/audiences’ evaluations and suggests that the perceived authenticity of literary dialect can be measured using methods similar to those employed in language attitudes research.