Thematic implications and representativeness in Wuthering Heights (1848): Dialect as a social reality

Abstract

Since language is a brainwork of speakers who live in social and physical environments, researchers are obliged to think about the alliance between the vocabularies’ meaning in dictionaries and their significance in social use. And because the novel is a fictional piece of writing which is primarily inspired by real life and reflects realities. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte strives to interfere in her characters’ thought and considers their social class, culture and experience; she acts as a writer, the speaker and the reader as well. These authorial qualities gave birth to a text combined of two language varieties, the Standard English and the Yorkshire dialect which are tightly interwoven without distorting the unity and the arrangement of the story plot. This paper looks to cover the different social inclinations of E. Bronte’s depiction of dialect in addition to some critical resonances of such representation. Keywords: Wuthering Heights, dialect representativeness, social reality, thematic implications, language.