Language Attitude Quotes

And why do English people sound smarter than the rest of us? Like they should be awarded the Nobel Prize for a simple greeting?

I, of course, don't have an accent. This is just how things sound when they are pronounced properly.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.

I guess I'd always mocked the American accent. I didn't consider it a respectable dialect, but I was told that it was.

Language mavens commonly confuse their own peeves with a worsening of the language.

It's maybe a better thought to change the perception of an accent than to avoid it all together.

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

Most educated Indians are bilingual. Amongst the urban elite though, there is a disdain for regional languages. That's unfortunate.