How Zora Neale Hurston used the Vernacular in her Writing (and Listen to her Sing)
No essay about the works of Zora Neale Hurston is complete without focus her use of Negro vernacular in her writing. Hurston was folklorist, anthropologist, and ethnographer. She was born in Alabama and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, one of the first incorporated black towns in the U.S. She did anthropological research in the deep south, the Caribbean and Honduras so she was well acquainted with various dialects of black English at the time. Eatonville was the setting for most of Hurston’s novels, and it was natural for her to weave the language of Eatonville into her writing. In fact, it would have been impossible to tell the story of Eatonville without incorporating the language of the town.
Modernist writers of the early 20th century found theoretical support for language exploration in the works of academics like Ferdinand de Saussure, a linguist who decentered language by exploring relationships between words and meaning. Earlier theorists saw writing as a divine and natural creation, but Saussure saw language as a social construction. His view of language appealed to modernists who looked for ways to express ambiguities and other states of impermanence relating to the human experience in writing. Because Black Florida English was Hurston’s first language, she was able to use to offer a compelling new perspective on the black experience in America of…