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I stumbled across this term on Wikipedia, so I know it exists, but I can't find it now through searching and two linguist friends weren't familiar with it.

In novels, a speaker's dialogue might be rendered phonetically to show that he or she is uneducated or speaking in the vernacular: "Enuf," he said, "Wot is going on?"

However, what is written is actually the conventional pronunciation, so it's not communicating anything about how the speaker sounds different.

Does anyone know what the term for this is?

Thanks for your help.

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    Like how Mark Twain writes people with different accents? I think this is called 'eye-dialect'.
    – Mitch
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 6:42

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There are two terms, "pronunciation spelling " and "eye dialect", both of which emphasize that the speaker is illiterate, unlettered, or speaking in a vernacular. The first emphasizes the mispronounced aspect of the speech, e.g., "fer sure." Here "fer" (sounds like "fir") is a stand-in for "for" (sounds like "four"). The latter represents words with standard pronunciation like "wimmen" (for "women") and your example "enuf" (for "enough"). The distinction is not always maintained in discussions of narrative, and both techniques appear together. See Peter Finley Dunne's "Mr. Dooley" or Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Remus stories.

(dictionary.reference.com)

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  • Good one. Except I'd soften "mispronounced" to "dialectically pronounced". +1
    – Brian Hitchcock
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 9:53
  • Okeh. (I've seen that one a few times and it seemed appropriate here)
    – user662852
    Commented Jun 29, 2015 at 21:16

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