Yas'm, Ah finely foun'him. In a bahroom, lak you told me. He?

Supposed slave dialect: meaning gentlemen.
A load of Hollywood and Southern regional baloney circa 1939.

"like you told me."

Might have been a bit overdone, but I have heard "chimbley" for chimney, so "amberlance" instead of ambulance is plausible.

"Lawd, Miss Scarlett, he say our gempmums done tuck his hawse an'cah'ige fer a amberlance." could be translated as "Lord, Miss Scarlett, he said our gentleman has taken his horse and carriage to be used as an ambulance.

At the time GWTW was published, most readers likely could have read along without much difficulty. Experience and mindset are all important here.

Agree. As I mentioned on a remarkably similar thread, I have heard 'chimbley' used to mean 'chimney'. I've also heard 'chirrens', or something like that to mean 'children'.

In some areas you still can hear a little of this.

Bahroom might be bathroom.

Bar room (19th Century AmE for 'bar') I would think.

The practice of rendering dialect speech phonetically seems to be falling out of fashion these days; you used to see lots of it in novels by British authors - regional English (e.g. Yorkshire, Cockney, "Yokel"), Welsh, Scottish, Irish etc. As the example makes clear it was common in American writing too. I think 19th and early 20th century readers would have expected to see phonetically written dialect in novels, because it clearly conveyed the speaker’s social status (and race especially in the quoted context) and level of education, which were important preoccupations at the time. Nowadays the trend is to avoid trick spellings and lexical gimmicks.

A modern reader is much more apt to see that sort of thing as reinforcing negative stereotypes, and condescending towards the type of person represented by the imagined speaker who is being quoted phonetically. "Gone With The Wind" is a particularly notorious example, along with the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris.


Uncle Remus

Not only people of certain social classes within the author's milieu were depicted thus, but you also encounter funny or stupid or menacing foreigners - the oily Frenchman who says "Mais oui! I 'ad a leetle dhrink!", the German who barks "You VILL obey or you vill be schot!", the inscrutable Chinaman who says "I no speakee Engrish." etc etc. See Kipling, Maugham, Mark Twain, Dickens (whom I forgive), Lovecraft, the Brontes, --- (I could go on for ever!)

The practice has been called giving a character a "Funetik Aksent", and is still to be found occasionally, especially in very bad writing such as fan fiction and Stephen King (whenever there is a character with a thick Maine accent).

It's not limited to obvious and overt stereotypes. I find that English authors who attempt to render American speech almost always get it wrong; i suspect, therefore, that American writers attempting render the speech of the English probably always get it wrong. For example, John Galsworthy's rendition of American speech in one of the Forsyte novels is glaringly inept, to an American. His character was a white man of what might be called the upper class (there is no consonance between classes in England and the United States). His character could hardly get through two consecutive sentences without saying "reckon." I've gone for years without hearing an American say reckon. I imagine the English feel the same way about American authors attempting to render the speech of the English. Even when someone knows intimately the speech of a certain region (and perhaps this applies to social classes as well), how they choose to render it might not be giving to the reader the sounds that the author hears in his or her head.

We're very used to this. So are the Scots, but the Welsh seem to have escaped (I don't believe Americans know about Welsh accents).

One reason English writers likely get the American speech patterns wrong is regionalisms, and a different structure of social class. A Boston Brahmin in Chicago is just going to be seen as someone with an odd accent, no one is going to assume anything about social class. (In fairness, i don't even know that Boston Brahmins still exist as a social class.) Furthermore, people are far more likely to react to the regional accent rather than any apparent social class. It should be kept in mind that if social classes exist at all in the United States, they are based on money, and to a much lesser extent, education. I was sitting with a friend in his apartment in Ohio (north) watching a television program on natural history. They interviewed a man who had a thick accent which i recognized as coming from the coastal barrier islands of South Carolina or Georgia, or the immediate coast line. The accent is so thick and unique, that other southerners have difficulty understanding it, especially in someone with little formal education--even people from their own state will have that difficulty. My friend casually remarked that although he understood that this man had a PhD, and was undoubtedly expert in his field, his automatic reaction in hearing him speak was "stupid redneck." I was gratified by his candor, at least.

In a P. D. James novel i once read, one of the characters, a child of privilege, was worried that no one would believe her in a certain situation. Her interlocutor, with a certain amount of resentment, says something to the effect of: "Oh, they'll believe you, as soon as you open your mouth." That doesn't apply in the United States, where if people are judged on their speech it will be based on regional accent, and to a much lesser extent, grammar. Many Americans have no concept of diction, and most Americans don't care how important you think you are. Trying to assert one's superior social class would just make you a figure of fun to the locals.

This is increasingly so in Britain*, where many younger upper and upper-middle class people speak in what has been called the "mockney" accent. Jamie Oliver is a famous example, at least when there is a microphone present. Prince William is another.

*It seems to me that many widely held American ideas about the British class system are 50 to 100 years out of date.

I had wondered about that. The P. D. James novel was written in the mid-90s. I once said that your speech marked your out for your region and your social class in England, with the caveat that i didn't know if that were still true. You commented that it is. So would people have fun with someone using a posh accent?

I've got a very posh accent, and nobody ever gives me any trouble about it, except that some working-class males think it implies homosexuality.

I just looked up mockney. Doing something like that in the U.S. would be grounds for a fist fight.

I am well-educated, both in the sense of formal education, and in the sense of education as the French use it--i was well educated at home. It is usually unnoticeable, although i get a funny look now and then when i use "whom." If you don't make a point of it, you will actually encounter some humility on the part of people who realize that you are well-educated, and feel their own lack of education. That only comes from long acquaintance, though, and usually doesn't engender resentment. Not long ago, in some context in which it seemed appropriate, i quoted the last stanza of Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison." That's the one that begins "Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage . . . " Someone else then said they liked the poem, and then said they wished they had had a university education. Well, of course, you don't need a university education to know something like that, but i was not entirely certain that it wasn't sarcastic, so i didn't comment.