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We speak student!

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Their Eyes Were Watching God

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Vernacular

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a la Shmoop

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How does Hurston's writing make us feel Janie's world?

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One of the things that stands out in her writing

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is that it is so

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highly vernacularly connected with what we think of

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Harlem in that era.

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And authors historically have been lambasted

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for being too vernacular in things.

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I mean, Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, with Huck Finn comes to mind

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as one that received a lot of attention

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in that domain.

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But to talk to us about her writing

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and how she makes us actually

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feel the world that she's in.

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Vernacular - first let's define that word.

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Kind of a big word.

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It basically means how people speak.

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So if someone were to write down exactly what we were saying word for word

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with the letters we drop because of our accents,

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that would be vernacular.

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And that's exactly what Zora Neale Hurston did.

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So when you look at the text

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of Their Eyes Were Watching God,

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it is so daunting, and you're like,

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"This almost looks like another language.

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I don't recognize this as English.

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How am I supposed to read it?"

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When you read it out loud, you get it.

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It sounds like people talking.

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So she basically mimicked people's voices

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by dropping letters that weren't often pronounced by those people,

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or kind of exchanging

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certain letters for others.

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And she has this entire book written in vernacular.

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This is part of the reason that she wasn't

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very much appreciated in her time.

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Hurston herself talks about how this vernacular is really

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an action language, and how

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African Americans were using

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action words.

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And if you really read closely, you'll see

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that a lot of the speech

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in Their Eyes Were Watching God is about action

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and doing.

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And Hurston was really trying to represent

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the realities of life. And if you write in a way

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that people don't actually speak,

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you can't do that.

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So she did it not only with her content,

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but with her writing style, as well.

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[ pen writing ]

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What is vernacular?

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Why did Hurston write in the vernacular of the time?

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Ooh, five dollar word.

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