Sociolinguistics Quotes

Americans use the word 'dream' as often as psychoanalysts do.

I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.

People think of black English as ungrammatical, but it bears the same relationship to standard English as contemporary Hebrew does to ancient Hebrew.

Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.

Linguistics becomes an ever eerier area, like I feel like I'm in Oz, Just trying to tell it like it was.

I love accents in general. I'm obsessed with dialects, and I had to write a whole movie about it called 'In a World...'

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.

Some people study a text very deeply. The people are my text. I study their words and what their words sound like, over and over again. When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country. It doesn't matter how educated they are. By living in the world and living their experiences, they bring extraordinary truths. I try to do those truths justice.

See, my strumpf is in my hair. Now, I don't know what strumpf means. It's just a term some brothas gave me.

Language is by its very nature a communal thing.

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

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

It is not quite true to say that I am not an advocate of writing in African languages. What I think is, one has to think about what is practicable.

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

My interest in the linguistic differences between women and men grew from research I conducted early in my career on conversations between speakers of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.

Women speak an average 18,000 more words a day than men do. And there may be a genetic reason, it may be neurologically. Not that there's anything wrong with it. See, this is the thing. When you make the observation that women talk 18,000 more words a day than men, it's immediately taken as a criticism because it implies inequality. It implies that there's something wrong with women.

I'm a linguist. I study how people talk to each other and how the ways we talk affect our relationships.

Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.

When I was a kid, my grandfather said that "if you say a word often enough, it becomes you." Thinking of that later in life gave me this idea that I could try to become America by learning the words of people from many aspects of the country.

At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject.

I don't understand why the accent you speak in has to indicate what level of intellect you have.

As a sociolinguist, I want to know how cultural differences affect the ways people talk and listen. My research method, inspired by the work of Robin Lakoff and John Gumperz of the University of California at Berkeley, is sociolinguistic microanalysis. I tape-record and transcribe naturally occurring conversations.

I think a very important aspect of language has to do with the establishment of social relations and interactions. Often, this is described as communication. But that is very misleading, I think.

Language is the road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.

Children, and sometimes those of larger growth, will not read dialect.