Eye dialect and casual speech spelling: Orthographic variation in OT

Abstract Nonstandard spelling of certain words in English, French and other languages is quite a widespread phenomenon, commonly referred to as Eye Dialect. Typical examples are instead of in English and instead of in French. Eye Dialect, despite using nonstandard spelling, maintains grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences that reflect standard pronunciation, unlike Casual Speech Spelling, which aims to transcribe substandard forms (e.g., ). In this paper I attempt to account for both phenomena in a framework couched in Optimality Theory, partly drawing on a set of constraints already proposed in existing literature (Song & Wiese, 2010), at the same time as proposing new ones justified on phonetic, cognitive or system-internal grounds. It is shown how Eye Dialect and Casual Speech Spelling, instead of creating new sound-to-letter relationships, promote the more general ones, at the expense of very specific or idiosyncratic phoneme-to-grapheme mappings. There are several other factors that seem to interact: the preference for 1:1 relationships (e.g., unambiguous graphemes are preferred to ambiguous ones), the acoustic salience of certain segments or features (e.g., stridency or nasality are more likely to require a graphic representation than glides or schwa), the visual salience of certain letters (e.g., letters whose shape extends to upper and/or lower spaces seem to contribute more to word recognition and are thus more likely to be retained). It is interesting to note that logography and rebus writing are also employed, along with Eye Dialect and Casual Speech Spelling. The common intent seems to be simplicity and, possibly, rebellion.