In Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love, the author utilizes a distinct and unique form of English. Bambara’s usage of improper grammar, slang, and nicknames fluctuates throughout the short, four page tale but stands to give voice to her young protagonist and show her emotional and mental state while also showcasing the racial and regional biases in her dialect. While the protagonist, Hazel, is reasonably developed throughout the tale, much of what we can infer about her state of mind and the world she lives in comes from the way she narrates and the language she uses alone. Throughout the story Hazel speaks in a broken dialect. Much of her speech is broken from the perspective of your average prescriptive English adherent. Hazel drops the end of words, as in the line “So far as I was concerned it was a change completely to somethin soundin very geographical weatherlike to me, like somethin you’d find in an almanac.” The lack of ending consonant sound alludes to both Hazel’s age (operating under the assumption that children do not enunciate their words very well) and the region she lives in (very obviously the South, as bolstered by the pecans featured in the back of…show more content… The spelling and word choice at work might imply Hazel is a simple country bumpkin, however there are subtle nuances here and there that show she is anything but. The usage and misusage of apostrophes seems deliberate in each and every case. While word endings that drop the consonant lack apostrophes where the missing letter says they should be, contractions and possessive nouns still contain them. If Hazel is indeed the one writing this story, then, it shows she is well aware of how they are used. Through both the character’s trickster nature and also her deliberate style choices, Hazel is obviously more intelligent than she lets
