1041: Eye Dialect Oct 15, 2017

Because there are standards for the spelling of English, and also because the orthography of English is not phonetic, writing in a way that captures accents and dialects is tricky. Nevertheless, people get around this problem by using what is called 'eye dialect', which is the orthographical denotation of, generally, nonstandard dialects. This can still be used to imply the pronunciation of the standard dialect, such as 'wuz' instead of 'was', or 'coz'/'cuz' instead of " 'cause", which can be quicker to write, and also would give the impression of being humourous or otherwise informal. Other times, like with this example from alphadictionary.com "Ahm agonna gichew ifn yew don't quit bothern my dawg!" which is meant to represent the way that Southern American English is spoken (though I would have written 'mah' instead of 'my'), existing conventions in the standard orthography are used to denote specific sounds in non-standard writing. As a sidetone, it is thought that 'OK' comes from a eye dialect: "oll korrect" ('all correct').