Diction in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain uses a regional diction to construct race in a controversial look at the antebellum South. All of the characters in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn have distinctive ways of speaking, but there are glaring differences between the prescribed diction of blacks and whites in the novel. The audience is allowed to see into the narrator's mind (Huckleberry Finn) and not into the minds of other characters. Huckleberry's thoughts are more intelligent than his communication, and the audience is able to place more trust in him than other characters because they can see this intelligence. All the audience sees of the black characters in the novel is their poor language skills and whites' perceptions of them. The reason we are able to distinguish the race of characters is because of Huckleberry calling Jim and the other blacks "niggers", which carried the connotation of a black individual when the book was written. Once Huckleberry makes this distinction, we are able to see differences in the ways that characters in the novel speak. Huckleberry is no master of proper English, but there are huge differences in the way he speaks and the way Jim (his black friend) speaks. Although Huckleberry uses many double-negatives when he speaks and ends many sentences in prepositions, readers easily understand what message Huckleberry is trying to convey. On the other hand, when Jim speaks, readers must carefully decipher what Jim is saying because his diction is so complex. Twain creates new words by writing the word the same way that Jim says the word: for example, "He's been shot in de back. I reck'n he's ben dead two er three days. Come in, Huck, but doan' look at his face-- it's too gashly" (Twain 59).
 By making it more difficult to understand Jim than Huckleberry, Twain portrays Jim as the more unintelligent individual. Other black characters in the novel speak in the same encoded way that Jim speaks. The slave Jack from the Grangerfords is not given full English words when Twain writes his speaking roles. He shortens and creates new words for Jack's speech: "You shove right in dah jist a few steps, Mars Jawge; dah's whah dey is. I's seed 'm befo'; I don't k'yer to see em no mo'" (Twain 113). Twain's use of regional diction allows his audience to be submerged in the racial situation of the antebellum South, while at the same time criticizing the institution of slavery and racial stereotypes.