How does language contribute to the total effect of Huckleberry Finn?

elegance associated with it. He is not using the spoken language of the people. Twain on the other, uses Huck’s dialect for serious literary purposes and his sustained use of it for the entire length of novel is one of the chief delights of the book.

But though Huck’s language is close to spoken English of rural Southwest America, Mark Twain has not created it merely by copying the speech pattern of a young semiliterate white boy. Used by the writer to replace the traditional literary style, it itself is a new literary style and utmost care has gone into its fashioning. Mark Twain has I apparently done a lot of stitching and unstitching though when we read the final product we are carried away by the apparent effortlessness of Huck’s narration. Implicit in this is the recognition that the narrator is naive and untutored. Such a recognition is imperative when Huck is the eye-witness narrator-participant in the novel and has to take the readers along.

Identifying Characters by their Language-

Having talked about the innovative use of colloquial English in Huckleberry Finn, it
is time to examine how Mark Twain has used language to create characters. The  language note at the start of the novel suggests that characters speak differently, which means we should be able to identify a character in the way he/she speaks.

Huck’s narrative style is used to achieve a variety of effects. He uses it for lyrical
description as in the dawn passage (Ch. 19), for inner wrestling with his conscience