“Dialect,” as it turns out, in the hands of sly and talented artists and astute and sensitive critics, may do cultural work that is a good deal more complicated than we may have thought. Rather than reifying a hierarchy that postulates something called “Standard English” on top and “dialect” of various sorts at the bottom, scholars today increasingly recognize the ways in which U.S. English is a dynamic amalgam of a range of varieties of speech and writing in which vernacular forms have always played, and continue to play, critical roles. Late-twentieth-century literary experiments such as Alice Walker’s vernacular, epistolary novel The Color Purple (1982) and Gloria Anzaldúa’s code-switching blend of poetry and nonfiction, Borderlands/ La Frontera (1987), remind us of the distinctive and radical energy and vitality of some of dialect writing’s contemporary heirs.

This is an excerpt from Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 81).