Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: Dialect, Race, and Identity in Stockett's novel The Help

This paper presents the results of a textual and linguistic analysis of characters' speech patterns and discusses the racial and cultural implications of the ways in which dialects are represented in the novel The Help by Kathyrn Stockett. The linguistic stigmatization of the black characters in Stockett's novel needs to be viewed as something much larger than a reflection of a single author's individual prejudices, but rather, as a popular-culture indication of the racial and class anxieties that are deeply woven into the sociocultural fabric of American society, a society that embraces and popularizes such linguistic choices.