Rudyard Kipling Quotes

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.

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

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

When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English.

Let the teachers teach English and I will teach baseball. There is a lot of people in the United States who say isn't, and they ain't eating.

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us.

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

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!'

If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

Every man prays in his own language.

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.

The world has wanted me to speak differently than I speak. You know, I speak like my mom; I speak like, you know, like the whitest white dude; I speak like a Def Comedy Jam comedian doing an impression of a white guy.

A lot of folks that ain't saying 'ain't,' ain't eating.

There are many languages in the world; in meaning all are the same. If you break the cups, water will be unified and will flow together.

The English language is nobody's special property.

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

There is no right language or wrong language any more than there are right or wrong clothes.

The Color Purple really floored me. That book was just incredible because I loved the language. The biggest deal of that book was that I loved the poetry of broken English. Broken English and vernacular. It just floored me that you can actually capture the way people really talked. And I also really connected to the social class element.

The world's five thousand extant languages are products of our shared ability, but the five thousand cultures they create are separate from each other.

Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.

Africa. There are a gazillion different languages people speak there, different bone structures, so vast and different.

[Dennis Mathis] was very sensitive about keeping the unique way that I spoke English - it had a lot of Mexicanisms or Mexican syntax. So you keep it in because it's adding something unique.

Language is our way of communicating what we want and who we are.