The Authorial Dialect Grapholect and the Possibilities of Its Perception

Abstract

This article discusses a study of written dialecticism, conducted in order to assess how the authorial grapholect conveys oral dialecticism and to analyse the spelling choices made by the author. The dialectal discourse used for this study consists of a number of Facebook posts published in a dialectal grapholect by a female informant. The first part of the article focuses on specific orthographic decisions made by the author-informant to convey the distinct features of her native Eastern Aukštaitian subdialect of Panevėžys. The second investigative section of the article examines the perception of a dialectal grapholect, looking closely at how ordinary language users read and understand texts written in it.