Quotes About Sociolinguistics

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

I hate women because they have brought into the currency of our language such expressions as "all righty" and "yes indeedy" and hundreds of others.

Serious students of language (as it relates to social class) have dealt, not with simple-minded concepts like "verbal" and "nonverbal," but rather with issues of style and of differing ways of using and relating to language.

With sociolinguistics, after covering the basics of the field, I focused on discourse analysis.

One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often.

In general, referring to a person by a body part, physical trait, or typical accoutrement—that is, by a metonym—is dysphemistic.

I'm sorry." I know it's the universal default, but the problem is, one's first knee-jerk response when someone says "I'm sorry" is to say "It's okay." We are programmed from kindergarten, from the first time the inevitable snot-nosed kid knocks over our blocks, to forgive. And it's not okay, it's as far from okay as it can really get, but there you are, tricked by a sociolinguistic tic into affirming that it is.

There is reinforcement in such familiar back-formations as Chinee from Chinese, Portugee from Portuguese.

I would like to discuss the psychological determinates in your use of copulative profanity.

I'm interested in why people talk like they do. Like Boston Irish. It's so laid back. Why is that?

glottochronology

The London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles.

Is "ho" always feminine, and "muthafucka" always masculine, while "bitch" can be either? How

We assume, to begin with, that the individual is at least as complex in his internal structure as the language is which he speaks - otherwise, how could he speak a language which is complex?