Quotes About Dialects

I love learning about different dialects and I own all sorts of regional and time-period slang dictionaries. I often browse through relevant ones while writing a story. I also read a lot of diaries and oral histories.

Mexican food is far more varied than people think. It changes like dialects. I was brought up in Jalisco by the sea on a basic diet - tomatoes, chillis, peppers of every size and rice, which is a Mexican staple. The Pacific coast has a huge array of seafood.

I think dialects should be left alone. People should write in whatever dialect they feel they want to write. In the fullness of time, these dialects will sort themselves out.

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.

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

The era of mass education and the standardization of the English language left such expressions as marks of uneducated people in the American South

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.

Las creencias propias se llaman religión, las de los demás se llaman superstición, lo nuestro es idioma, lo que hablan los demás son dialectos, y lo que hacen los blancos se llama arte, y lo que hacen las demás razas es artesanía.

I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.

Language is too grand for these chaps; let's give them dialects!

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

Latin, Greek, and English, plus a smattering of Italian and fucking French." "Fucking French, you say? Well . . ." "Oui," said I, in perfect fucking French.

He had a great variety of invocations and expletives, and two modes of speech, or dialects, one of which he employed in the presence of men and the other in what was called mixed company. Lanny had been about the world enough to know that this was supposed to be the way of a "he man," and he thought it rather silly.

To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

Examples of elision in Mexican Spanish abound—pa' instead of para (for), apá instead of papá (father), SanTana instead of Santa Ana, pos instead of pues (well), and my supposed gaffe.

Noam Chomsky has famously argued that a Martian scientist would conclude that all earthlings speak dialects of the same language.

And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

We need spies that look like their targets, CIA officers who speak the dialects terrorists use, and FBI agents who can speak to Muslim women who might be intimidated by men.

I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

Somebody sent me a British magazine listing the 20 worst dialects ever done in movies. I was No. 2, with the worst Cockney accent ever done. No. 1 was Sean Connery, because he uses his Scottish brogue no matter what he's playing.

I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.

As a nation we love our dialects, and there is a lot of regional variance in the names for different foods - barmcake, bap or bun anyone?

Mexican food is far more varied than people think. It changes like dialects. I was brought up in Jalisco by the sea on a basic diet - tomatoes, chillis, peppers of every size and rice, which is a Mexican staple. The Pacific coast has a huge array of seafood.