Seventh grade English students are reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and studying one of America’s classic authors, Mark Twain. During our reading, we look at the historical context of the novel, the differences in adolescents, and dialect.

As we studied the way language affects a novel, we took time to look at some Southern dialect from this novel and translate it to words and phrases we would say today. Examples like, “It was a middling warm in school, warn’t it?” and, “He’s full of the Old Scratch!” It was determined that Twain’s choice to take the time and carefully select the language for the novel was important. The classes agreed that without the Southern dialect, the novel would not be as “real” and “full of personality.”