William Labov Quotes

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

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

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

You know, now there is always half of the new Quebecers who are going to the English CEGEP. After that, often they are going to work in English. So for us, that is so important. We are a real minority in North America. Two per cent of the population are French-speaking. We have to protect this reality.

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.

A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

I studied French in high school and German in college and I once took a 24-hour Italian crash course. English has by far the most words in it of any other language. Our money might not be worth anything anymore, but the language is.

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

You cannot have one or two million immigrants a year and still have English as the only official language of the country.

Language, especially in this country is a daily plebiscite.

If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

In South Africa, we speak English and sometimes Afrikaans, sometimes Zulu, sometimes Xhosa.

If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.

The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.

Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.

When I went to school, I didn't know a lick of English, but it was okay because there were so many immigrants in the area, a lot of the kids didn't speak a lick of English, either. It was normal to have a wicked accent.

I want to live in a Britain whose residents are determined to speak English.

It's better to live a world where you can hear different languages and sensibilities.

Walter Benjamin used to think that languages expand their register thanks to translation, because translation forces ways of using words and structures that were alien to the original speaker of the target language.

I'm obsessed with how people talk! Accents, dialects... So whenever I go someplace where an accent is extremely distinct - Minneapolis, New Orleans, Jamaica, Vancouver - I always find myself trying to pick up the subtleties of their patterns.

As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.

I think it's about the feeling more than a language. And I think that we and every culture in the world has to keep their own language just to bring something else, something different, and show a different vision of the world, actually. And that's why I'm trying to keep my language.

Somehow, German just vanished at some point. We already started at an early stage to translate our albums, and at some point, we started to write only in English.

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

You don't have to speak English to have sophisticated political opinions.