Quotes & Sayings About Spoken English

French, spoken by a number of people at a distance, strongly resembles the quacking conversation of ducks and geese, with its nasal elements. English, on the other hand, has a slower pace, and much less rise and fall in its intonations. Spoken at a distance where individual voices are impossible to distinguish, it has the gruff, friendly monotony of a sheepdog's barking. — Diana Gabaldon

My mum is Brazilian and very proud. I'd love to do a Brazilian film. I've been brought up in the Brazilian culture. My mum brought me up on my own, I cook Brazilian food, I've never spoken a word of English to my mother. — Kaya Scodelario

Few words in any language carry such a load of meaning as 'honor.' It is an old word, unchanged even in its spelling from classical Latin to modern English. Spoken or written, it does not seem to require much explanation; most people think they know what it means. — Edmund Morgan

It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you - — Eliezer Yudkowsky

English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs. — Peter Prasad

I am genuinely sorry for scientists of the younger generation who never knew Fisher personally. So long as you avoided a handful of subjects like inverse probability that would turn Fisher in the briefest possible moment from extreme urbanity into a boiling cauldron of wrath, you got by with little worse than a thick head from the port which he, like the Cambridge mathematician J. E. Littlewood, loved to drink in the evening. And on the credit side you gained a cherished memory of English spoken in a Shakespearean style and delivered in the manner of a Spanish grandee. — Fred Hoyle

All around me I hear the pleasant chortle of Dutch. It sounds vaguely familiar, though I can't imagine why. Then it dawns on me. Dutch sounds exactly like English spoken backward! ...
I wonder if I recorded someone speaking Dutch and played that backward, it would sound like regular English! — Eric Weiner

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough. — Adam Gopnik

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. — Annie Dillard

The English language was spoken and written - but at the time of Shakespeare it was not defined, not fixed. It was like the air - it was taken for granted, the medium that enveloped and defined all Britons. But as to exactly what it was, what its components were - who knew? — Simon Winchester

The English people, a lot of them, would not be able to understand a word of spoken Shakespeare. There are people who do and I'm not denying they exist. But it's a far more philistine country than people think. — Colin Firth

HOSTESS. Oh, nonsense! She speaks English perfectly.
NEPOMMUCK. Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well. — George Bernard Shaw

Prayer was not a sacred or holy thing. It was not spoken plainly, in Twi or English. It need not be performed on the knees or with folded palms. For Akua, prayer was a frenzied chant, a language for those desires of the heart that even the mind did not recognize were there. — Yaa Gyasi

Sometimes I feel I can't quite master my written and spoken Spanish, because I'm too much a student of English. I would need another lifetime to learn it. — Sandra Cisneros

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago. — Carl Sandburg

Skaz is a rather appealing Russian word (suggesting "jazz" and "scat", as in "scat-singing", to the English ear) used to designate a type of first-person narration that has the characteristics of the spoken rather than the written word. — David Lodge

Command of English, spoken or written, ranks at the top in business. Our main product is words, so a knowledge of their meaning and spelling and pronunciation is imperative. If a man knows the language well, he can find out about all else. — William Feather

Function words behave differently than you might think. For example, the most commonly used word in spoken English, I, is used at far higher rates by followers than by leaders, truth-tellers than liars. People who use high rates of articles - a, an, the - do better in college than low users. And if you want to find your true love, compare the ways you use function words with that of your prospective partners. — James W. Pennebaker

Shafiul's English, it must be said, is limited (although as one wag pointed out, not as limited as his interrogators' Bengali). So when he was asked whether he had deliberately tried to disrupt Trott's elongated guard-taking procedure by aborting his own run-up, he insisted there had been no plan. Pushed moments later on whether [Jamie] Siddons had spoken to the team about the need to disrupt Trott's elongated guard-taking process, Shafiul nodded jubilantly. We were left none the wiser. — Lawrence Booth

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

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate. — William Golding

My parents grew up in poor families where little English was spoken, they both went to college and became teachers. They believed that anything was possible with hard work, and they particularly stressed the importance of education. They instilled that same belief in my sister and me. — Samuel Alito

It is no exaggeration to say that the English Bible is, next to Shakespeare, the greatest work in English literature, and that it will have much more influence than even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken language of the English race. — Lafcadio Hearn

While he has not, in my hearing, spoken the English language, he makes it perfectly plain that he understands it. And he uses his ears, tail, eyebrows, various rumbles and grunts, the slant of his great cold nose or a succession of heartrending sighs to get his meaning across. — Jean Little

The will of God is revealed as you listen to the Spirit of God in the Word of God. The precepts and promises of the Bible teach us what to pray. They teach us what grace to ask for and for what work we need strength. On every page of the Bible there is subject matter for prayer. B. F. Westcott, a renowned nineteenth-century English Bible scholar, observed: "The petitions of true disciples are echoes (so to speak) of Christ's words. As He has spoken so they speak. Their prayer is only some fragment of His teaching transformed into a supplication, and so it will necessarily be heard."[50] One way to pray more effectively is to echo God's Word back to Him as you pray. We align our hearts with His heart as we pray His Words from our hearts. — Archie Parrish

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. — Robert Lacey

The difficulty of learning spoken English for a person profoundly deaf from an early age has been likened to a hearing American trying to learn spoken Japanese while locked within a soundproof glass cubicle. — Andrew Solomon

As children, we are taught what I call Emotional English. This is an emotional language we are taught in our homes, and just like our spoken language, the emotional language we speak most fluently as adults is the one we learned as children. What we are taught about interacting emotionally with each other and the world is modeled for us by our families, and is what we will grow up doing. No matter how frustrating , damaging, and frightening it is, we will perpetuate the examples of our parents and family
unless we can learn new ones. The tricky thing is that a person can go to school to learn a new language, we can find classes anywhere, in any town, but how do we learn a new emotional way of relating to our lives, loved ones, and most important, to ourselves? — Jewel

Richard Burton had a tremendous passion for the English language, especially the spoken and written word — Frank Bough

And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical.
("How to Write with Style". Essay, 1985) — Kurt Vonnegut

I missed New Jersey, primeval and green in the summer, a Currier and Ives painting in the winter. I missed hearing English sloppily spoken, — Anonymous

And then, this she offered to me, my one truth: "Our language," she said, "is not spoken, but sung ... Not simply words ... and grammar ... but melody. It was hard ... thus ... to learn English ... this language of wood. For the people of your nation, Octavian, all speech is song. — M T Anderson

It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out. — George Mikes

Remind me who you are," he said in a gentler tone, almost a please. "How we know each other."
"Okay," she began. "I'm Savannah Evans, a grad student and teaching assistant who teaches English at a college in Cambridge. I applied to the colony to work on my poetry and arrived six weeks ago. "We've spoken many times. You've praised my work, which I find a great honor as I'm a fan of your art. — Lisa Carlisle

It is said that the American vocabulary has declined by half in the past few decades. It's a tragic instance of desertification following upon monocultural commodity production, the clear-cutting of written and spoken English. — Stephanie Mills

There was a jauntiness in the young woman's manner that appealed to Isabel. And then there was the accent, which was not Scottish, but from somewhere in Northern Ireland and not unlike Georgina Cameron's; the English that Shakespeare would have spoken, preserved by centuries of relative linguistic isolation. — Alexander McCall Smith

In a couple of Ahdaf Soueif's novels, she gets at the certain kind of English that's being spoken by Egyptians. It's a beautiful, expressive English but it is non-standard, "broken" English that happens to be efficient, eloquent, and communicates perfectly well even if it is breaking rules. — Elliott Colla

A little later, the Apollo mission was consummated and there were Americans on the moon. I remember distinctly looking up from the quad on what was quite a moon-flooded night, and thinking about it. They made it! The Stars and Stripes are finally flown on another orb! Also, English becomes the first and only language spoken on a neighboring rock! Who could forbear to cheer? Still, the experience was poisoned for me by having to watch Richard Nixon smirking as he babbled to the lunar-nauts by some closed-circuit link. Was even the silvery orb to be tainted by the base, earthbound reality of imperialism? — Christopher Hitchens

That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable ... but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music. — John R. Rickford

Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue. — John McWhorter

Though representatives of many ethnic groups came together in the United States, English became their common language. Apparently, this was a natural choice. One can imagine what would have happened if members of each nation moving to the U.S. had spoken only their own tongues and refused to learn English. — Mikhail Gorbachev

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today. — Joshua Foer

I made my promises in English and Anton did the same and even if the little priest understood not a word of it, we were given to know it was understood by God and that the union was made for better or worse, no matter what the tongue, for the language of the heart is spoken in all the corners of the earth. — Ute Carbone

ENGLISH: the ultimate body language. If not spoken by the English. — G.S. Oldman

Intended to serve as an introduction to both the linguistic and also the practical study of spoken English. — Henry Sweet

I don't have an English accent because this is what English sounds like when spoken properly. — James Carr

In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay. — Richard Rodriguez

At three o'clock in the afternoon, all the fashionable world at Nice may be seen on the Promenade des Anglais - a charming place, for the wide walk, bordered with palms, flowers, and tropical shrubs, is bounded on one side by the sea, on the other by the grand drive, lined with hotels and villas, while beyond lie orange orchards and the hills. Many nations are represented, many languages spoken, many costumes worn, and on a sunny day the spectacle is as gay and brilliant as a carnival. Haughty English, lively French, sober Germans, handsome Spaniards, ugly Russians, meek Jews, free-and-easy Americans, all drive, sit, or saunter here, chatting over the news, and criticizing the latest celebrity who has arrived - Ristori or Dickens, Victor Emmanuel or the Queen of the Sandwich Islands. — Louisa May Alcott

As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke. — John McWhorter

Although spoken English doesn't obey the rules of written language, a person who doesn't know the rules thoroughly is at a great disadvantage. — Marilyn Vos Savant

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

Imagine you're visiting a place where there's little to no English spoken and you wake up one day to find that the group you went with has all gone home and you are left there alone. — Kim De Blecourt

Soon we're both frowning hard at the paperwork. "Middle name?" Noah says. "Does Gideon even have a middle name?"
"I don't know"
Noah turns to me and says, "Do you have a middle name?" his glare implying that, if I do, this whole thing is somehow my fault.
"I ... have no idea."
"Primary language spoken at home." Noah makes a face. "What does this mean? Our primary language? Gideon's? That's sort of why we're here ... "
"Um, it's under family, so I'm guessing ours?"
"Well ... " Noah lowers his pen. The paperwork has defeated him. "What's our primary language?"
"English? ASL? Physical affection?"
"Food?" Noah says.
"Food's a good guess."
He picks up the pen. "I'm writing food, comma passive aggressive."
"Good call. — Hannah Moskowitz

I took a seat. The garden was bursting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even known it to be something that I'd want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly. It occurred to me that I really was in someone else's country and yet, in some necessary way, I was outside of their country. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Good English, well spoken and well written will open more doors than a college degree ... Bad English will slam doors you don't even know exist. — William Raspberry

The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was busting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was that I had not spoken a single word of English that entire day. Perhaps it was that I had never sat in a public garden before, had not even know it to be something I'd want to do. And all around me there were people who did this regularly. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [ ... ] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals. — David Sedaris

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation. — Stephen Leacock

I fell in love the moment I saw her in her grandfather's kitchen, her dark curls crashing over her Portuguese shoulders. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she smiled.
'I'm really not that thirsty.'
'What? What you say?' Her English wasn't too good. Now I'm seventy-three and she's just turned seventy. 'Would you like to drink coffee?' she asked me today, smiling.
'I'm really not that thirsty.'
'What? What you say?' Neither of us has the gift of language acquisition. After fifty years of marriage we have never really spoken, but we love each other more than words can say. — Dan Rhodes

I don't care how someone lives or how good their spoken English is. I do all of my interviews on Skype text chat - all that matters is their work. — Matt Mullenweg