Dialect Quotes

I speak a little bit of Italian, yeah. I understand more than I speak. I speak more of a dialect; my mum's from Naples and my dad's from Sicily, so it comes out little a bit of a cocktail of the Italian language.

At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.

So still were the big woods where I sat, sound might not yet have been born.

If you think of music as a universal language, it still has some very powerful dialects.

A non-standard dialect is as valid communication system as the standard

From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves.

I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.

My whole deal when I do accents or dialects is I gotta fool the locals. If I fool the locals then I've done my job.

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

One cannot understand the rhythms and meanings of the outer world until one has mastered the dialects of the body.

An academic dialect is perfected when its terms are hard to understand and refer only to one another.

When you get to speak Irish, you become more at one with yourself, you kind of have a spark when you use it, and I think it's a great dialect.

There's a grosser irony about Politically Correct English. This is that PCE purports to be the dialect of progressive reform but is in fact - in its Orwellian substitution of the euphemisms of social equality for social equality itself - of vastly more help to conservatives and the US status quo than traditional SNOOT prescriptions ever were.

He [Barack Obama] was light-skinned with no Negro dialect.

No one writes dialect better than Flannery O'Connor. No one should even try.

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

Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?

Ebonics - or black English, as I prefer to call it - is one of a great many dialects of English. And so English comes in a great many varieties, and black English is one of them.

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

I have a dialect myself; it's more pronounced, because I have studied theatre and been in England. It's half-British, half-Indian.

Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are.

Each dancer has a different dialect that they speak.

A frightful dialect for the stupid, the pedant and dullard sort.

I grew up being fascinated by accents and dialects. One of the things that interested me were actors that were doing different characters, or sort of more caricatures.

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.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

I am lucky to have been gifted with a good ear and the ability to mimic. If I can hear it... I can replicate it, whether it's a dialect or just matching the tone of someones voice.

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

I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.

In the philosophical dialect, a cynic takes an insult as a compliment since opposition is already his style.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, dance is not a universal 'language' but many languages and dialects. There are close to 6000 verbal languages, and probably that many dance languages.

I'm good with dialect. Some actors do it immediately; other actors never quite get it. It's something I've always really enjoyed and something I've always been pretty fast with.

Each culture might lend its own dialect, but above all that is the language of music itself, and it doesn't care about politics or boundaries.

Always, in epochs when the languages and dialects of a culture have become outstripped by development of a practical sort, these languages become repetitive, formalised -- and ridiculous. Phrases, words, associations of sentences spin themselves out automatically, but have no effect: they have lost their power, their energy.

Dialogue that is written in dialect is very tiring to read. If you can do it brilliantly, fine. If other writers read your work and rave about your use of dialect, go for it. But be positive that you do it well, because otherwise it is a lot of work to read short stories or novels that are written in dialect. It makes our necks feel funny.

You can't live in a dialect without tremendous work. Like any muscle, accents and voices and languages are all formed out of the muscles that we have in our mouths and faces and tongues.

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

Cantonese, which has up to nine tones as opposed to the five in Mandarin, is much more versatile and one of the richest dialects in Chinese.

English has a better way with colloquialisms. It has colloquialisms that are colorful and expressive but not too heavy or distracting. In German, if you use colloquialisms, it quickly descends into some kind of dialect literature.

Welsh is now almost a national language in Wales. The Scottish dialects are reviving to some extent. I don't think it's a major thing, but it's there, and it's happening elsewhere.

I don't have a Jersey dialect. So when I approached the singing, I approached it the same way as an actor I approach a dialect, just as a singer.

French was the only language we had in common, and even that was like a dialect we had picked up at a rummage sale, rusty and missing a lot of essential parts.

Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.

I did all the dialect work, all my character work completely by myself.