Quotes About Dialect

Language-wise, my mom and dad's dialect, they're pretty obscure. It's Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn't something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.

The London dialect as it is spoken in educated circles.

and he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover.

he had a Boston accent that could scrape the rust from a manhole cover.

I had a dialect coach to get an American accent, and then another dialect coach to come off it a bit. There is something deep and mysterious in the voice when it isn't too high-pitched American.

Sea Island blacks spoke in the Gullah dialect of their forebears (a blend of African languages that was a distinctive patois).

Zanzotto ricorda che la nonna dialettofona, la nonna popolana recitava a lui piccolo versi familiari del Tasso, e quell'armonia del toscano illustre filtrava nella sua coscienza come "una vera e propria droga fonica, sopra il continuum un po' selvatico della parlata dialettale".

I always put the apostrophe in "ain't" to make certain I'm using proper improper English.

The wash of so many peoples had left behind a complex detritus: ruined strongholds; graves and tombs; steles carved with cryptic glyphs: songs, dances, turns of speech, fragments of dialect, place-names; ceremonies of purport now forgotten, but with lingering flavour. There were dozens of cults and religions, diverse except that, in every case, a caste of priests interceded between laity and divinity.

I'm not very good at standard English.

I tried to write 'Trainspotting' in standard English, but people weren't talking like that.

I think every English actor is nervous of a Newcastle accent.

We must thank fate (and the author's thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then he would have been lost. When I want a good nightmare I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume of Dikanka and Mirgorod stuff about ghosts haunting the banks of the Dniepr, burlesque Jews and dashing Cossacks.

They said "whar" for where, "thar "for there, "critter" for creature, "nekkid" for naked, "wider" for widow, and "younguns" for young ones. They were always "fixin" to do something, or go "sparkin" instead of courting, and the younguns "growed up" instead of grew up. Children were referred to as "little shits".

For 'Dum Maro Dum,' I had a diction tutor, as I had to get rid of my Hyderabadi Hindi and learn Goan Hindi. It wasn't easy, because these two kinds of Hindi were mutually incompatible. I had to unlearn one kind of Hindi and then learn a new kind.

I started out in New York, and New York has a way of countering a Southern accent, naturally; when I moved to Los Angeles for a job, and I just stayed, the dialect out here doesn't really counter, and my Southern started coming back.

An even more telling side of that blindness was the way White spent his leisure time in those days. When not writing his editorials, designed either to puff Kansas business or elect the Republican ticket, he would pass the time composing "dialect verse

I have the thickest accent of any Nova Scotian you've ever imagined.

It's impossible to explain to a Yankee what 'tacky' is. They simply have no word for it up north, but my God, do they ever need one.

when she spoke even now, after forty years, among the slurred consonants and the flat vowels of the land where her life had been cast, New England talked as plainly as it did in the speech of her kin who had never left New Hampshire

But his key label is 'cant'. He defines the word as follows: 1. A corrupt dialect used by beggars and vagabonds 2. A particular form of speaking peculiar to some certain class or body of men 3. A whining pretension to goodness, in formal and affected terms 4. Barbarous jargon 5. Auction When a word is

I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.

I think Shakespeare is like a dialect. If I heard a broad Scots accent, I'd probably struggle at first but then I'd start to look for words I recognise and I'd get the gist. I think Shakespeare is like that.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.