David Crystal Quotes

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

I love accents.

I have a funny accent in every language.

I love dialects and accents; they're something that really resonate with me and that I find fascinating.

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.

Children, and sometimes those of larger growth, will not read dialect.

People who share the same language, French or Chinese or whatever, have the same vocal cords and emit sounds which are basically the same, as they come from the same throats and lungs.

I'm about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.

I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

Americans aren't good at accents, but the English are because their accents change. You go five or six blocks and the accent is different, so they are used to hearing different pitches. In America, you gotta travel maybe 10 states before you can really hear a difference.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

When I heard Puerto Ricans in New York City, it sounded very strange. And the first time I heard someone from Spain, I thought they had a speech impediment!

My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.

Well, I'm trilingual myself. I am, I know how to speak Spanish, English, obviously, and I speak pretty good Ebonics.

The way I think or sing about something is very different if it is in Spanish or English.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.

I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'

I've always been very in tune to my voice and to other people's voices and how they express themselves vocally. And I always loved accents and dialects - I collected them like stamps.

One of the nice things about the United States is that, wherever you go, people speak the same language. So native New Yorkers can move to San Francisco, Houston, or Milwaukee and still understand and be understood by everyone they meet. Right? Well, not exactly. Or, as a native New Yorker might put it, 'Wrong!'

I like playing with languages and dialects as we have so many in India. Adding a dialect just makes the dialogues more colorful.