The Representation of Earlier African American Vernacular English By Charles W. Chesnutt

This article examines the authenticity of regional speech represented in the writings of African American short story writer, essayist, lawyer, and stenographer Charles W. Chesnutt (1858–1932) using a corpus of spoken dialogue extracted from his literary works (approximately 40,000 words). To assess its accuracy, data collected for the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the surrounding area—the region where the author spent his youth and his stories are set—are compared with the speech of his Black characters. The results reveal that the LAMSAS records and Chesnutt’s dialogue share many expressions in their regional dialect, ranging from single words to phrases. Despite the limitations of the Atlas interviews to record all the synonyms and semantically related words, the overall consistency between the two provides evidence that Chesnutt’s literary dialect offers a glimpse of earlier AAVE spoken in the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Furthermore, this article touches on Chesnutt’s racial identity and what led him to enter the literary world as it is pertinent to his linguistic background and the motive behind his use of literary dialect.