20 Things You Didn't Know About Raising Arizona
6. The Dialect Is Made Up Solely Of What The Coens Thought The Characters Would Be Reading
Speaking of Roger Ebert's review, he made note of the weird speech style of the film's characters, stating that every character "elevates their dialogue to an arch and artificial level that's distracting and unconvincing and slows down the progress of the film."
While Ebert didn't like this aspect of the film, the elevated, colourful dialect style was fully intentional by the Coens, and actually was entirely made up for the characters.
The duo drew on local Arizonan dialect to create a convincing Southern drawl for the characters, but also mixed in dialect based on the reading materials they thought these small town citizens would be reading. To them, that meant magazines and the Bible.
Ebert noted that H.I. "could play Ebenezer Scrooge with the same vocabulary - and that's not what you expect from a two-bit thief who lives in an Arizona trailer park." But really, it's this bizarre stylisation that makes the film so unique.