Dialect in Children's Literature

Dialect in literature is a helpful tool that an author may use in order to make his or her characters well-rounded. By using a certain dialect for a character, the author is actually telling the reader more about that character's background without directly stating anything. It is a subconscious detail that readers sometimes rarely notice if they are caught up in the book. The understanding of a particular dialect requires that the reader understand the stereotype behind that dialect. There is no set standard dialect and so "many writers often lapse into stereotypes based upon a mixture of personal experience and a conventional set of structures taken from other authors' literary representations of dialect" (Wolfram 309). Many small children are yet unaware of these stereotypes and so dialect in their books is very uncommon. Creating dialect for characters in children's books can get a little tricky because kids are still learning how to spell words and form grammatically correct sentences.