Which is also common in Coen movies. You can see it the most in The Big Lebowski. The Dude “borrows” a lot of words from other characters.
I get a lot of Amish fiction, mostly romances, to review, and in many of them, the author has the Amish people speaking without contractions. This is bullshit.
Don’t you mean, “This is bullshit, English”? 
And mangles them, of course. Ditto for Brad Pitt’s character in Burn After Reading which is sort of a spiritual successor to The Big Lebowski, satirizing the conspiracy spy thriller genre in place of the noirish private investigator.
Complaining that the Coens dialogue is stylized is like complaining that water is wet. Overly cerebral dialogue and anachronism in the midst of a period or genre setting are the cinematic hallmarks of the Coen Brothers, as much as stylized violence and profanity is of Quentin Tarantino, or the iambic and allegorical vernacular is of David Mamet. The Coens could have made a basic, standard issue genre Western (and would have been castigated for merely “remaking” the earlier film); instead, and in a manner true to the feel of the source material, they made a movie about a collection of odd, somewhat dissociated people in a strangely unworldly environment.
Stranger
Consider also the dialogue in the movies The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven, and, to a lesser extent, Open Range.
All of them employ the same technique to one degree or another.
FWIW, I like the Coen’s True Grit better than the John Wayne version.
Was the dialog in Unforgiven stylized?
I thought part of the kudos the movie received was for the more “realistic” dialog. (And is also what makes English Bob stick out a little more.) I could be mistaken…
Come on, this is harsh. The OP’s question is akin to asking if Michelangelo sculpted David with disproportionately large hands and head. Was this typical of the era? If not, why did he do it? Was it a mistake?
These questions are important to the appreciation of art and don’t deserve your snarky jerk response.
I’ve just watched this again, and loved the dialogue even more than before - I find it genuinely powerful and beautiful. In some ways, it reminds me of the over-the-top dialogue in Tombstone, my all time favourite Western, although that had a more operatic feel compared to True Grit’s theatricality.
I may have to watch Tombstone now.
Do you think that lawmen of the West talked like this?:I guess you think I’m kicking you, Bob. But it ain’t so. What I’m doing is talking, you hear? I’m talking to all those villains down there in Kansas. I’m talking to all those villains in Missouri. And all those villains down there in Cheyenne. And what I’m saying is there ain’t no whore’s gold. And if there was, how they wouldn’t want to come looking for it anyhow.
or gunslingers like thus?:
That’s right. I’ve killed women and children. I’ve killed just about everything that walks or crawled at one time or another. And I’m here to kill you, Little Bill, for what you did to Ned.
Stranger
The stylized dialogue of True Grit comes from the book, not from the minds of the Coen Brothers. I love the Coen brothers, but with regard to the subject matter of this thread I’m not sure why there are so many posts about the cleverness of the Coens. (Unless slavishly following the dialogue of the book makes them clever.)
The book has one of the most unreliable narrators in fiction. Rooster spoke as Mattie chose to remember him speaking, not as he probably really spoke. And Mattie was a priggish Calvinist who probably hadn’t used a contraction since she was 10.
I wish that Mr. Portis posted on the 'Dope. 
It takes more than dialogue written on a page to make a scene memorable, and the Coens understand how to pull of this kind of dislocation without making it sound pretentious. (This is something that Deadwood struggled with at times; Ian McShane and Paula Malcomson were the only members of the cast that could pull off the convoluted dialogue believably on a consistent basis.) The Coens also selectively pulled and edited the dialogue from the book. Not to take credit away from Portis, but his dialogue would have survived the tooling of few other directors and screenwriters.
Stranger
Nitpickery, but I would add William Sanderson as Farnum as another character that handled the dialog extremely well, especially his soliloquies.
Heh. Unfortunately (?), I don’t hang out with too many of them types.
I agree with you about your other points, and the Coen brothers are among my favorite directors. But I think the original ending was horrible, and that it was a mistake to put it in the film. Two of the three main characters are dead, and the girl grew up old, bitter and without an arm. So why should I care about anything in the movie then, when everything is just terrible anyway? I haven’t read the book, but I understand that it is sort of implied that she fell in love with Matt Damon, and that’s why she never took a husband. But in the movie it just seems that it’s because her life was ruined when her arm was lost, and no one would ever love her then.
Charles Portis does that. The Hunchback of Notre Dame doesn’t end well, either.
The first True Grit also lifted most of its dialogue verbatim from Portis.
Credit where credit is due, and in this case, the credit for the cleverly-stylized dialogue goes to Portis.
(Not that the Coens aren’t capable of similar things. The stylized dialogue of Raising Arizona springs to mind.)
Mattie is, if not a sociopath, very different from most people, and “never had time to fool with” marriage and the other confinements of domestic life. (Can you imagine her as a wife? A mother?) In the opening voiceover, she seeks vengeance, although less perhaps out of sentiment (she displays little) or anger (which she appears to hold in reserve) than an almost abstract desire to see karmic justice set right and not just a little bit to embark upon adventure. Her loss of the arm is presaged in the same monologue:*People do not give it credence that a young girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood. But it did happen. I was just 14 years of age when a coward by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down and robbed him of his life and his horse and two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band. Chaney was a hired man and Papa had taken him up to Fort Smith to help lead back a string of Mustang ponies he’d bought. In town, Chaney had fallen to drink and cards and lost all his money. He got it into his head he was being cheated and went back to the boarding house for his Henry rifle. When Papa tried to intervene, Chaney shot him. Chaney fled. He could have walked his horse, for not a soul in that city could be bothered to give chase. No doubt Chaney fancied himself scot-free. But he was wrong. You must pay for everything in this world, one way and another. There is nothing free, except the grace of God. *
This is not a heartwarming holiday movie, or a story in which justice is delivered only to the deserving. Killing Tom Chaney didn’t bring her father back, of course. She paid for her revenge and adventure by accepting, and suffering the hazard of wandering the wilds. This, too, is a thematic constant with the Coens: the element of randomness that can suffer ill (or sometimes undeserved fortune) to even the most heroic figure for no reason.
Agreed that Portis is the author of the clever dialogue; but the Coens and the actors are responsible for making it work on screen. A comparison to the 1969 film where nearly the same dialogue is used shows just how masterful the 2010 film was about illuminating Portis’ story on screen.
Stranger
It does?