Quotes & Sayings About Dialects

Poetry must find ways of breaking distance ... all languages are dialects that are made to break new grounds. — Giannina Braschi

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. — Gael Garcia Bernal

Brahmin who'd learned the tribal dialects. He refused — Jhumpa Lahiri

In college, I went to school for acting; we had to learn phonetics just to be able to do dialects and all that stuff. I'm somebody who does better just hearing it. I'll just imitate it, and I get it better that way. When I know too much information, I'm not great. — Eliza Coupe

I've always had a penchant for dialects. I remember getting detention and being told, 'Have a think about where doing these funny voices might get you someday.' — Nolan North

Glass. A broad resembles the a of the German; as all, wall, call. Many words pronounced with a broad were anciently written with au; as sault, mault; and we still say, fault, vault. This was probably the Saxon sound, for it is yet retained in the northern dialects, and in the rustick pronunciation; as maun for man, haund for hand. The short a approaches to the a open, as grass. The long a, if prolonged by e at the end of the word, is always slender, as graze, fame. A forms a diphthong only with i or y, and u or w. Ai or ay, as in plain, wain, gay, clay, has only the sound of the long and slender a, and differs not in the pronunciation from plane, wane. Au or aw has the sound of the German a, as raw, naughty. Ae is sometimes found in Latin words not completely — Samuel Johnson

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. — Jane Harman

Modern biblical scholars have established that the bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God and was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications and non-sequiturs. — Steven Pinker

Language is so specific to art, all the way to the past in China. Previously, people were not allowed to include various regional dialects in their films, but in every film that I've made, I've maintained the regional dialects of the characters because I wanted to make films that were locally specific. — Jia Zhangke

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. — Rutina Wesley

There are stories that are by and for Latin Americans, where a certain amount of cultural fluency is expected, where we can delight in the details, the humor, the particularities of speech, of dialects. Something is always lost in translation; we know instinctively that this is the case. A Radio Ambulante story looks at Latin America from the inside. — Daniel Alarcon

The Language of the Dream/Night is contrary to that of Waking/Day. It is a language of Images and Sensations, the various dialects of which are far less different from each other, than the various Day-Languages of Nations. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Same language, different dialects.
Same words, different pronunciation.
Same experiences, different reactions.
Same wisdom, different understanding.
Same knowledge, different application.
Same love, different expression.
Same ancestry, different races.
Same world, different people. — Matshona Dhliwayo

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them. — John McWhorter

People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. — Pico Iyer

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. — Ron Rash

Tis true, that We are here a mix'd People--of different Countries Dialects, and Denominations. But how ridiculous it is, to carry any Nationality Prejudice, or Bias about Us in these Respects. We ought to leave them all behind Us in the Ocean and consider ourselves as one Great family--pursue one General Interest and banish all Selfishness, Bigotry--Narrow Spiritedness, and Atachments, whether it arises from Motives of Religion, Custom--or Habit--for these are Great follies, and very wide of the Christian Temper. — Charles Woodmason

Out here we speak Malspeak, a mangle of English and old languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. Dialects from a time when the land was defined by many borders. Now there's only one that matters. And I am on the wrong side of it. — Georgia Clark

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. — David Tang

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. — William Labov

Aside from the basic African dialects, I would try to learn Chinese, because it looks as if Chinese will be the most powerful political language of the future. — Malcolm X

John's was not a glum, negative, insulting attack on society but a sharp-witted, entertaining, cock-a-snook approach that encouraged young people to express themselves as individuals and to reject the stifling rigidity of a lot of the older social traditions. Thanks to John, to give one example, regional dialects were no longer looked upon as a hindrance. He made no attempt to tone down his Liverpool accent (indeed, he exaggerated it) and this encouraged others to follow suit. Previously, without cut-glass Oxford English, it was impossible for anyone to make progress in the media. John changed all that, and a great deal more as well. (Desmond Morris) — Yoko Ono

Books that Uncle bought in Odessa or acquired in Heidelberg, books that he discovered in Lausanne or found in Berlin or Warsaw, books he ordered from America and books the like of which exist nowhere but in the Vatican Library, in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, classical and modern Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, medieval Arabic, Russian, English, German, Spanish, Polish, French, Italian, and languages and dialects I had never even heard of, like Ugaritic and Slovene, Maltese and Old Church Slavonic. — Amos Oz

I am fascinated by the evolution of language, and how local versions diverge to become dialects like Cornish English and Geordie and then imperceptibly diverge further to become mutually unintelligible but obviously related languages like German and Dutch. The analogy to genetic evolution is close enough to be illuminating and misleading at the same time. When populations diverge to become species, the time of separation is defined as the moment when they can no longer interbreed. I suggest that two dialects should be deemed to reach the status of separate languages when they have diverged to an analogously critical point: the point where, if a native speaker of one attempts to speak the other it is taken as a compliment rather than as an insult. — Richard Dawkins

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. — William Labov

I just love dialects; they're really fun. — Cory Michael Smith

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. — Doris Lessing

I believe it is important to preserve dialects as well as the regional accents of an area. Oral tradition is still necessary and by using dialectal WORDS as the mortar, we can connect future generations with their heritage. — Patricia H. Graham

Rigorously comb through the pages of your life until you can even speak its broken dialects fluently. — Curtis Tyrone Jones

Quantum theory was split up into dialects. Different people describe the same experiences in remarkably different languages. This is confusing even to physicists. — David Finkelstein

To knock today's prestige dialects off their pedestals, it helps to realize that they are really foul perversions of yesterday's prestige dialects. — Greg Carlson

Time and again the people still in the camp, realizing they were now trapped, called to God in a hundred different dialects. He laughed and cried at once. He had so many names, yet could not answer to any of them. — Ron Currie Jr.

What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymoogy: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. The clash of these elements, as competitive as Italian dialects is invigorating, richly entertaining, and often funny, as it is to Shaskespeare, who gets tremendous effects out of their interplay. The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.. — Camille Paglia

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. — Ishmael Beah

There are thousands of dialects and hundreds of languages spoken in religious countries. Do you
think God is a human who understands all that?
It's your intentions which make your prayers successful.
Do you pray out of fear, lack, or despair - or
out of positive expectations, gratitude, and love? — Maddy Malhotra

For the history of left-hand-path ideas, the all-important figure of Odin underwent a radical, yet predictable, splitting of image. He was - like all the other gods - portrayed as the epitome of evil. In parts of Germany, the speaking of his name was forbidden. It is for this reason that the modern German name for the day of the week usually called after him was renamed Mittwoch, "Mid-Week," while Thor (German Donar) keeps his weekday name, Donnerstag. The original name survives in some German dialects as Wodenestag or Godensdach.28 However, even after Christian conversion he still retained his patronage over the ruling elite. All the Anglo-Saxon kings continued to claim descent from Woden,29 and in the English language he retains his weekday name, Wednesday (Woden's day). — Stephen E. Flowers

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry ... your oppressed ... give me pretty much everybody"-that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are-and should be-a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones ... We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women. — Anthony Bourdain

As Brother Francis readily admitted, his mastery of pre-Deluge English was far from masterful yet. The way nouns could sometimes modify other nouns in that tongue had always been one of his weak points. In Latin, as in most simple dialects of the region, a construction like servus puer meant about the same thing as puer servus, and even in English slave boy meant boy slave. But there the similarity ended. He had finally learned that house cat did not mean cat house, and that a dative of purpose or possession, as in mihi amicus, was somehow conveyed by dog food or sentry box even without inflection. But what of a triple appositive like fallout survival shelter? Brother Francis shook his head. The Warning on Inner Hatch mentioned food, water, and air; and yet surely these were not necessities for the fiends of Hell. At times, the novice found pre-Deluge English more perplexing than either Intermediate Angelology or Saint Leslie's theological calculus. — Walter M. Miller Jr.

Kit spoke vintage vinyl in all its dialects. And he casually rubbed elbows with stars from all walks of life. Oh, and he was twenty. And drop-dead gorgeous. Kit Hemion was a very big way Aaron's Records made money with the West Side set. — Suzanne Stroh

My whole deal when I do accents or dialects is I gotta fool the locals. If I fool the locals then I've done my job. — Brion James

the eight main "dialects" of Chinese are so vastly different that they are, under any analysis, separate languages. The — John McWhorter

One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body. — Timothy Leary

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. — William Labov

Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so. — William Labov

But this is a story,
and in a story
there is always someone
beautiful enough.
- 'The Girl with Two Skins' from A Guide to Folktales in Fragile Dialects — Catherynne M Valente

Regional dialects have to become national tongues before they can attain lasting glory. As with America, as with Australia. Scottish is different because Scotland considers itself to be a nation. Its language deserves a chapter to itself. — Anthony Burgess

Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy. — Robin Tunney

The angels are so enamored of the language that is spoken in heaven that they will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects of men, but speak their own, whether their be any who understand it or not. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian. — Liev Schreiber

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. — Steven Heller

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. — Marcel Proust

I grew up being fascinated by accents and dialects. One of the things that interested me were actors that were doing different characters, or sort of more caricatures. — Sharlto Copley

When I was doing theater for all those years in New York, I did a lot of classical theater, wearing big corsets and big dresses and doing dialects. It's interesting that once I moved to TV, I'm playing these scrappy, contemporary toughies. — Mireille Enos

Those who reason most powerfully and are the most successful at ordering their thoughts so as to make them clear and intelligible will always be best able to persuade others of what they say, even if they speak in the thickest of dialects — Rene Descartes

The contribution of West African languages to Ebonics is absolutely infinitesimal. What it actually is is a very interesting hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects that we often learn about in school. — John McWhorter

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. — Thomas Babington Macaulay

I can speak four dialects, but none of them is fairy language. — Zen Cho

You cannot give anything more important than the Love reflected in your own life. That is the one true universal language, which allows us to speak Chinese or the dialects of India. For if, one day, you go to those places, the silent eloquence of Love will mean that you will be understood by everyone. — Paulo Coelho

We [ with Russel Crowe] had an Arabic coach there [ in the Body of Lies] that was really helpful, because it was more so than any accent. You have to be so exact, and there's different dialects of Arabic from country to country so it was really, really difficult to tell you the truth. And one of the hardest things I've ever had to do language-wise, because it comes from the throat. It's different. And also learning about the customs and the culture and all that, so we had advisors for that sort of thing. — Leonardo DiCaprio

The English language is the tongue now current in England and her colonies throughout the world and also throughout the greater part of the United States of America. It sprang from the German tongue spoken by the Teutons, who came over to Britain after the conquest of that country by the Romans. These Teutons comprised Angles, Saxons, Jutes and several other tribes from the northern part of Germany. They spoke different dialects, but these became blended in the new country, and the composite tongue came to be known as the Anglo-Saxon which has been the main basis for the language as at present constituted and is still the prevailing element. — Joseph Devlin

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. — Brad Pitt

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms. — Ben Schott

There is a diversity of thought and philosophy, diversity of languages and dialects, diversity of political spectrum, and there's a diversity of taste for food. I don't label or characterize Jews in any way. — John Liu

Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning 'to know'. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce. — Ronald Carter

I'm from Connecticut, and we don't have any dialects. Well, I don't think we have any dialects, and yeah, it's very complex. That Rhode Island/Massachusetts New England region is arguably the hardest dialect to nail. — Seth MacFarlane

From the time of the North Briton of the unprincipled Wilkes , a notion has been entertained that the moral spine in Scotland is more flexible than in England. The truth however is, that an elementary difference exists in the public feelings of the two nations quite as great as in the idioms of their respective dialects. The English are a justice-loving people, according to charter and statute; the Scotch are a wrong-resenting race, according to right and feeling: and the character of liberty among them takes its aspect from that peculiarity. — John Galt

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. — David Crystal

The wind fights in the treetops; the leaves move in a hundred dialects of green...
p.17 — Fredrik Backman

[On The Philippines:] ... eighty dialects and languages are spoken; we are a fragmented nation of loyal believers, divided by blood feuds and controlled by the Church. — Jessica Hagedorn

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages. — Judith Lynne Hanna

Everywhere the sky is blue. There are a multitude of cuisines and dishes. I think of them as the languages and dialects of food. — Ferran Adria

A Nonstandard Graph, Elements and Operations, a Card Game Dialect A combination of the Mold dialects and Sandwich graphs, backed by axiomatic math, creates a unique space of science and fantasy. — J.M.K. Walkow