Deborah Tannen Quotes

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

One of the first studies in the field of gender and language, by Don H. Zimmerman and Candace West in 1975, found that in casual conversations between women and men, women were interrupted far more often.

As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations.

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'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.

I speak with a Northern Irish accent with a tinge of New York. My wife has a bit of a Boston accent; my oldest daughter talks with a Denver accent, and my youngest has a true blue Aussie accent. It's complicated.

They seem to be charmed by my Southern accent.

Language usage always has a political context.

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.

I am the youngest of three girls. My first linguistics book was a study of 'New York Jewish conversational style'. That was my dissertation.

With sociolinguistics, after covering the basics of the field, I focused on discourse analysis.

Why don't men like to stop and ask directions? This question, which I first addressed in my 1990 book 'You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation', garnered perhaps the most attention of any issue or insight in that book.

It might seem at first surprising that when I studied women and men talking at work, I found that women 'interrupted' each other more often than men did - when they were in all-women conversations.

I think, for the English accent, we don't say our Rs, contrary to a standard American accent.

Women are more complicated communicators than men, who have a tendency to pronounce and bloviate, and that makes for better writing in talky work.

All communication is more or less cross-cultural. We learn to use language as we grow up, and growing up in different parts of the country, having different ethnic, religious, or class backgrounds, even just being male or female - all result in different ways of talking.

The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth

I just got back from New York, and I realized in New York, it's very difficult to hear a New York accent. It's almost impossible, actually - everybody seems to speak like they're from the Valley or something. When I grew up, you could tell what street in Dublin someone's from by the way they talked.

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.

I was born and raised in New York, so I was blessed - or some say cursed - with a strong New York accent.

I love accents. It's a great way to separate yourself when playing a role.

I think all regions have had their peculiarities of speech rounded off by television, radio, and people travel so much more now.

I've done a lot of plays before where I had to do a New York accent, but never a Philly one before. They do the rhotic 'r' - where you say the 'r' - where most New Yorkers don't.

The word 'demand' is a tricky word when used by our gender. When used by men, it's part of their vernacular.