Quotes About Dialects

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

However, research in the years that followed found that in many of its important features, African American Vernacular English was becoming not less, but more different from other dialects.

Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

If I'm going to be honest with you, when I trained at school, I feel like I was training to be a chameleon. I want to be that versatile actor who can do anything - that's why you learn fifty different dialects, you do Shakespeare, you do commedia, you do it all so that if any job comes your way, you should be able to do it.

I love playing characters with different accents. It's a lot of fun.

In a fractured world, sensitivities related to race, economic class, and geographical dialects have justly increased. Modern ears don't skip casually over words that would have been commonplace a half century ago, or variations in dialect that remain the norm in other parts of the country today. Hopefully that means we're more aware—but it also puts us in danger of sanitizing what is and what was.

My work had two objectives: the presentation of every type of folktale, the existence of which is documented in Italian dialects; and the representation of all regions of Italy.

Just as there are accents in speech, there are regional accents in sign. People from the South sign slower than people in the North—even people from northern and southern Indiana have different styles.

Just like humans, British cows moo in accents specific to their region.

There aren't a lot of humans who speak more than one dialect of Forshan. I know all four of the major ones.' 'Impressive,' Duvall Said. 'I'm good with my tongue,' Dahl said. 'Now who's being forward?' Duvall asked.

precisely the same way the pastoral novels of George Sand, which she was giving me for my birthday, were regular lumber-rooms of antique furniture, full of expressions that have fallen out of use and returned as imagery, such as one finds now only in country dialects.

Just as the speaking subject only understands and speaks as a possessor of a system of gesticulation defined by dimensions of variation, the subject that perceives movement can only do so inasmuch as he possesses the equivalences of a sort of natural language: that's what sensory fields are, given diacritical systems with use values and characteristic equivalences. But between these fields there are also equivalences, like a common language of these dialects.

Sheridan hit the nerve. In one of his lectures, in 1762, he wrote: "Pronunciation . . . is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people or members of the beau monde." He took no prisoners. "All other dialects are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedantic or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgrace annexed to them.

Most English speakers in Europe, I was discovering, had learned to speak British English rather than the American version.