Answer the Following Questions Before the Beginning of Class

Name:______

Me’n Huck

A lesson in colloquialism

Answer the following questions before the beginning of class.

1.  What is colloquialism?

2.  List features of Huck’s language that makes the way he speaks unique.

Directions: The following lines are taken from Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. For each line spoken by Huck, you need to rewrite the lines in proper English.

1.  “Aunt Polly- Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is- and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with stretchers, as I said before” (Twain 1).

2.  “This shook me up considerable, because I didn’t want to go back to the widow’s any more and be so cramped up and sivilized, as they called it” (Twain 25).

3.  “Well , I did. I said I wouldn’t, and I’ll stick to it. Honest injun, I will. People would call me a low-down Abolisionist and despise me for keeping mum- but that don’t make no difference. I ain’t a-going to tell, and Iain’t a-going back there, anyways. So, now, le’s know all about it” (Twain 43).

4.  In the space below, find an excerpt from the novel to rewrite in proper English.

a.  Line:

b.  Proper English:

5.  a. Line:

b. Proper English:

Huck’s Version of “The Gettysburg Address”

Directions: You will each be assigned a portion of “The Gettysburg Address” (564) to rewrite in the space below using the dialect of Huck Finn.

Evaluating the use of Colloquialism

Directions: