Linguistic Variations Quotes

I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.

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.

[European audiences differ from American] they talk different. The ones in Holland speak Dutch. The ones in Switzerland speak Swiss. That's the only difference.

Brits and Americans have hundreds of different phrases for the same thing. Luckily, it's usually a source of amusement rather than frustration. A flashlight by any other name is still a torch. My personal favourite is 'fairy lights,' which we boringly refer to as 'Christmas lights.'

When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!

I get called Jacqueline Bissette in America. In France, I get called Jackie Bisset. And actually, it is Jacqueline Bisset, which is not that easy to say.

In Nova Scotia, there are some definite down-home accents, and it's funny because you can go to Sydney, and one guy is from North Sydney, and you can't understand a thing he's saying, or Glace Bay or wherever.

We British say "to put the world to rights." I've discovered that that's not the way Americans say it and people scratch their heads and say, "Funny... what does he mean by that?" It means to fix the thing, to make it all better again.

'Shkoff' is to eat. 'Shkiaff' is to slap. Like, 'Gettouttahere I'm gonna give you a couple of shkiaffs,' or, 'Forget presentation, just shkiaff the food onto the plate.'

The Australian accent is sort of like going down a step in smartness, you could say, because you guys pronounce things as they're spelled. We add and abbreviate stuff.

Names are not always what they seem. The common Welsh name Bzjxxllwcp is pronounced Jackson.