Linguistic Prejudice Quotes

When I speak English, I've been told, I have this patrician way of speaking that's very irritating. It's the whole class thing.

At various points, I've had a massive chip on me shoulder. I had fights about me accent with loads of those fellers you get from third-class public schools. They used to think I was speaking German.

The one thing that no Anglo-Saxon can stand is to be ruled by someone who 'talks fancy' by using Latinate words too often.

It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.

You can't do Shakespeare with a Southern accent, honey.

Dialect words—those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel.

I was always told at school I was posh, then I came to London, and here I'm told I have a country accent.

The way you speak should not determine your intelligence. I should be able to say 'lit,' and you still know I'm intelligent. I should be able to say 'turn up,' and that doesn't take away from my intelligence. I wanted to break down that stereotype a little bit.

I was always curious about the anxiety a person would feel when you open your mouth and you have an accent. You could have a Ph.D. or be a lawyer, but as soon as you say something, you may be diminished in the eyes of someone else.

It's inevitable that not everyone will like me, and that some will find me annoying. That's fine. All presenters deal with that. What's scary is the ignorance about what having a regional accent means, or indeed doesn't mean. It certainly doesn't equal ignorance.

I knew no one in New York City was going to hire me if I had a southern accent.

I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

A rejection of the way a woman speaks is often a way of blaming or dismissing her without dealing with the content of what she is saying.

The racism in South Asia is the most specific racism in the world. It's like racism against a slightly different language group. It's like micro-racism.

Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.- Every word is a prejudice.

I'm intimidated by anyone with a British accent.

There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.

It's the idea that when you say 'actress', people think of an airy, floaty, no-brain person, which of course you can't be if you are an actor. It is an unfortunate word, which is why, for a time, I hung on to 'actor', because it just seemed more workmanlike, you know, like you say 'woman doctor' not 'doctoress'.

It is everyone's story. We are ashamed of our native language, be it Punjabi or Urdu. If you make mistakes while speaking your native languages, no one will say anything. But if you say one word incorrect in English, people will treat it like a crime.