Quotes About Dialect

Today, the official national language is Italian. This is based on the dialect of Florence, although people from each region have their own accents and speak Italian in a slightly different way. In some northwest border regions near France the people may speak French; and German is spoken in the far north. Sardinia has its own language.

I aint a redneck 'cause I talk American real good!

In time [the newsboys] developed their own dialect and traditions and codes of conduct, the prevailing one being the code of the wild, under which smaller newsboys were regularly plundered by larger ones, the littlest of them--some as young as five years old--being as weak and vulnerable as the baby fish that gave them their nickname: small fry.

But my advice is—have the courage to let your marriage be some fiery country in the throes of revolution where each of you speaks a different dialect and sometimes you can barely understand each other but it doesn't matter because, well, each of you is fighting. Fighting for each other.

In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly: The vulgar Americans speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.

Estuary English creeps in and shows no sign of ebbing.

She had believed that she'd been born with a soul whose thoughts were in no particular dialect, and she'd imagined that, when she married, her husband would be able to recognize this deep part of herself.

I don't speak fluent bumpkin...