Which Phonological Features Get Represented in Dialect Writing? Answers and Questions from Three Types of Liverpool English Texts

Previous work which has set out to investigate the ways in which dialect writing texts use respellings of standard English words to represent the phonology of a non-standard variety have typically either aimed to document that certain recognised dialect features are represented in a text or have focused on a small set of predetermined features to determine how robustly they are represented in a text. This piece takes an inductive and quantitative approach and investigates the first around 1000 words of three different types of dialect writing texts from one variety, noting each occasion of respelling and allocating it to the necessary set of distinct dialect features (or to eye dialect) as appropriate. This process generates a set of the dialect features which are represented in dialect writing for the variety concerned: Liverpool English. The chapter considers the characteristics of the texts that are investigated in some detail. This is linked to a substantial separate (but related) goal: to work towards a full understanding of the notion of ‘respelling’ in dialect writing, considering the phonological, non-phonological, dialectological and non-dialectological issues that constrain and motivate the use of respelling.