Mark Twain’s Use of Language: Questions Racism
Mark Twain’s Use of Language: Questions Racism
Mark Twain is known as one of the best American writers and his characters are also icons throughout literature. His stories were published across a forty-year span in the 1800s and continue to be read worldwide. Twain is still recognized for his use of language in his stories and questioned on many different levels to why he wrote many of his books in Southern slang along with racial slurs. Twain is usually greeted as an expert on the writer’s use of language. (Hoben, 166) A common goal of Mark Twain’s writings is to show the variety of American speech and express it in all of his different characters throughout his years of writing books that caught the eyes of millions. In many of his stories, the dialogue throughout is very confusing and unfamiliar to students who read it now, opposed to the people who read it when it was first published in the late 1800s.
The dialogue does not introduce new words, but it would shorten and\or changes the spelling of the word to make it more difficult to read. Many people reading his stories understand what Twain is trying to get across, but the style of dialogue is very different than how writers would today. Twain also wrote like this so that his readers could understand the way his characters sounded while speaking, due to the way of spelling and the pauses seen throughout the sentence, and to let the readers imagination take charge on how his characters sounded. Students and readers of Mark Twain’s stories today also need to understand his use of language, and unfortunately it causes a problem, when his characters address black people as “niggers.” In his book, Huckleberry Finn, the word nigger is seen more than 200 times. Many schools and publishing companies have been changing the “n” word and replacing it with ‘slave’ or other words that aren’t considered as vulgar. Many of them which don’t make sense in most of this book because Jim ran away from Miss Watson,
Mark Twain is known as one of the best American writers and his characters are also icons throughout literature. His stories were published across a forty-year span in the 1800s and continue to be read worldwide. Twain is still recognized for his use of language in his stories and questioned on many different levels to why he wrote many of his books in Southern slang along with racial slurs. Twain is usually greeted as an expert on the writer’s use of language. (Hoben, 166) A common goal of Mark Twain’s writings is to show the variety of American speech and express it in all of his different characters throughout his years of writing books that caught the eyes of millions. In many of his stories, the dialogue throughout is very confusing and unfamiliar to students who read it now, opposed to the people who read it when it was first published in the late 1800s.
The dialogue does not introduce new words, but it would shorten and\or changes the spelling of the word to make it more difficult to read. Many people reading his stories understand what Twain is trying to get across, but the style of dialogue is very different than how writers would today. Twain also wrote like this so that his readers could understand the way his characters sounded while speaking, due to the way of spelling and the pauses seen throughout the sentence, and to let the readers imagination take charge on how his characters sounded. Students and readers of Mark Twain’s stories today also need to understand his use of language, and unfortunately it causes a problem, when his characters address black people as “niggers.” In his book, Huckleberry Finn, the word nigger is seen more than 200 times. Many schools and publishing companies have been changing the “n” word and replacing it with ‘slave’ or other words that aren’t considered as vulgar. Many of them which don’t make sense in most of this book because Jim ran away from Miss Watson,