Accent Dialect Quotes

Q’eeng had just attempted in the third dialect the traditional rightward schism greeting of “I offer you the bread of life,” but his phrasing and accent had transmuted the statement into “Let us violate cakes together.

Her accent's funny, different from mine, different from anyone in Prentisstown's. Her lips make different kinds of outlines for the letters, like they're swooping down on them from above, pushing them into shape, telling them what to say. In Prentisstown, everyone talks like they're sneaking up on their words, ready to club them from behind.

It was once said that this is the land of the free. There is, I believe, a statue out there in the harbor, with something written on it about "Give me your hungry...your oppressed...give me pretty much everybody"-that's the way I remember it, anyway. The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are-and should be-a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones.... We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women.

I believe it is important to preserve dialects as well as the regional accents of an area. Oral tradition is still necessary and by using dialectal WORDS as the mortar, we can connect future generations with their heritage.

There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.

What is surprising, even deeply disturbing, is the way that many individuals who consider themselves democratic, even-handed, rational, and free of prejudice, hold on tenaciously to a standard language ideology which attempts to justify restriction of individuality and rejection of the Other

A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple.

Dutch was the first language of noted abolitionist Sojourner Truth, born Isabella Baumfree in Swartekill, New York, near the end of the 1790s. She almost certainly spoke English with a Dutch-inflected accent. Yet, reproductions of her speech were written in the stereotypical dialect universally chosen to portray the speech of enslaved Blacks, no matter where in the country they lived. Under this formulation, the experiences of growing up hearing and speaking Dutch had no effect upon Truth. It was as if the legal status of being enslaved, and the biological reality of having been born of African descent, fixed her pattern of speech, almost as a matter of brain function.

When dealing with the excessively rich and privileged, you’ve got your two basic approaches. One is to go in hard and deliberately working class. A regional accent is always a plus in this. Seawoll has been known to deploy a Mancunian dialect so impenetrable that members of Oasis would have needed subtitles, and graduate entries with double firsts from Oxford practise a credible Estuary in the mirror and drop their glottals with gay abandon when necessary. That approach only works if the subject suffers from residual middle-class guilt – unfortunately the properly posh, the nouveau riche and senior legal professionals are rarely prey to such weaknesses. For them you have to go in obliquely and with maximum Downton Abbey. Fortunately for us we have just the man.

One day in the future, the meaning of *irie* will move on, and it will become just another word with a long list of archaic or obsolete definitions. *Is everything irie?* someone will ask you in a perfect American accent. *Everything's irie,* you will respond, meaning everything's just okay, but you really don't feel like talking about it. Neither of you will know about Abraham or the Rastafari religion or the Jamaican dialect. The word will be devoid of any history at all.

In my native valley of the middle Dniester, gentry spoke Polish, peasants — Ukrainian, officials — Russian with the Odessa accent, merchants — Jewish, carpenters and joiners — being Filippians and Old Believers — Russian with the Novogrod accent, the kabanists spoke in their own dialect. Additionally, in the same area there were also villages of Polish-speaking noblemen, and nobles who spoke Ukrainian, Moldovan villages speaking in Romanian; Gypsies speaking in Gypsy, Turks were no longer there, but in Khotyn, on the other side of the Dniester and in Kamieniec, their minarets were still standing...All these shades of nationality and languages were also in a semi-fluid state. Sons of Poles sometimes became Ukrainians, sons of Germans and French — Poles. In Odessa, unusual things happened: the Greeks became Russians, Poles were seen joining Soyuz Russkavo Naroda. Even stranger combinations arose from mixed marriages. ‘If a Pole marries a Russian woman,’ my father used to say, ‘their children are usually Ukrainians or Lithuanians’.

John's was not a glum, negative, insulting attack on society but a sharp-witted, entertaining, cock-a-snook approach that encouraged young people to express themselves as individuals and to reject the stifling rigidity of a lot of the older social traditions. Thanks to John, to give one example, regional dialects were no longer looked upon as a hindrance. He made no attempt to tone down his Liverpool accent (indeed, he exaggerated it) and this encouraged others to follow suit. Previously, without cut-glass Oxford English, it was impossible for anyone to make progress in the media. John changed all that, and a great deal more as well. (Desmond Morris)

But Christianity has protected itself from the beginning. It begins with the teaching about sin. The category of sin is the category of individuality. Sin cannot be thought speculatively at all. The individual human being lies beneath the concept; an individual human being cannot be thought, but only the concept "man." —That is why speculation promptly embarks upon the teaching about the predominance of the generation over the individual, for it is too much to expect that speculation should acknowledge the impotence of the concept in relation to actuality. —But just as one individual person cannot be thought, neither can one individual sinner; sin can be thought (then it becomes negation), but not one individual sinner. That is precisely why there is no earnestness about sin if it is only to be thought, for earnestness is simply this: that you and I are sinners. Earnestness is not sin in general; rather, the accent of earnestness rests on the sinner, who is the single individual. With respect to "the single individual," speculation, if it is consistent, must make light of being a single individual or being that which cannot be thought. If it cares to do anything along this line, it must say to the individual: Is this anything to waste your time on? Forget it! To be an individual human being is to be nothing! Think—then you are all mankind: cogito ergo sum [I think therefore I am]. But perhaps that is a lie; perhaps instead the single individual human being and to be a single human being are the highest. Just suppose it is. To be completely consistent, then, speculation must also say: To be an individual sinner is not to be something; it lies beneath the concept; do not waste any time on it etc. [. . .] Sin is a qualification of the single individual; it is irresponsibility and new sin to pretend as if it were nothing to be an individual sinner—when one himself is this individual sinner. Here Christianity steps in, makes the sign of the cross before speculation; it is just as impossible for speculation to get around this issue as for a sailing vessel to sail directly against a contrary wind. The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I. Speculatively, we are supposed to look away from the single individual; therefore, speculatively, we can speak only superficially about sin. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation

In fact, it is pretty certain that within, say, 20 or 30 years, local differences would have emerged, so that at minimum there were local accents. Given that the world changes, and that it changes in different ways in different cultures, there would be new words and expressions limited to particular places, but there would also be somewhat different local forms of speech. Within, let us say, 50 years, there would be clear local dialects, and quite certainly by the end of a century some of these would be so different from one another that speakers from some places would have considerable difficulty in understanding the speech of those from some other places. Depending on how those differences lined up with social and political realities, it would soon become common to speak of them as different languages.

Cantor’s 60-minute C&S shows were largely carried by himself, Wallington, and violinist Dave Rubinoff, with occasional guests. Rubinoff supposedly led the orchestra. It was typical early ’30s variety: Cantor singing and mugging, situation skits, orchestra numbers, violin solos. Rubinoff’s segments were billed as “Rubinoff and His Violin,” and his radio-fed fame in those days was greater than that of most noted concert violinists. He “was a good violinist rather than a great violinist,” Cantor wrote years later: but Rubinoff was “a showman who gave the impression of being all the great violinists put together.” His Russian accent was so formidable that he did not speak on the air. In the early days, Cantor did Rubinoff’s lines: he would ask a question in his natural voice and answer it with a Russian accent. Cantor played every conceivable dialect, from “an Irish policeman to a Swedish cook.” Later he hired people for his skits: Teddy Bergman (Alan Reed) and Lionel Stander played dialects, including the Rubinoff role.

While Dixieland men may have struggled with a language inferiority complex, the opposite is true of Southern women. We’ve always known our accent is an asset, a special trait that makes us stand out from our Northern peers in all the best ways. For one thing, men can’t resist it. Our slow, musical speech drips with charm, and with the implied delights of a long, slow afternoon sipping home-brewed tea on the back porch. In educated circles, Southern speech is considered aristocratic, and for good reason: it is far closer linguistically to the Queen’s English than any other American accent. Scottish, Irish, and rural English formed the basis of our language years ago, and the accent has held strong ever since. In the poor hill country there haven’t been many other linguistic influences, and in Charleston you’d be hard pressed to tell a British tourist from a native. In the Delta of Mississippi and Louisiana, the mixture of French, West Indian, and Southern formed two dialects--Cajun and Creole--that in some places are far more like French than English.

Today, the official national language is Italian. This is based on the dialect of Florence, although people from each region have their own accents and speak Italian in a slightly different way. In some northwest border regions near France the people may speak French; and German is spoken in the far north. Sardinia has its own language.

Can an eighteen-year-old Yemeni, with a Yemeni accent, who speaks a specific tribal dialect and doesn't speak English, really be an English-speaking middle-aged Egyptian general who's also the leader of an experienced Arab army? They tried for years to hammer a square into a circle, but they couldn't. Here was my own puzzle: How could this have been so complicated?

I was always admonished by my English teachers in their heavily accented, Viennese-inflected English not to speak this abomination of an “American dialect” or “American slang” and never to use “American spelling” with its simplifications that testified prima facie to the uncultured and simpleton nature of Americans.

As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther’s Bible created a single German tongue. Suddenly millers from München could communicate with bakers from Bremen. Out of this grew a sense of a common heritage and

One way to get up-to-date travel information while driving in the South is to install a citizens band, or CB, radio into your car. …truckers devised their own radio dialect based on jargon filtered down from military, aviation and law enforcement radio protocols. A basic understanding of on-air etiquette and terminology is essential for those wishing to join in the conversations…might include an exchange like this (with translations): Break one-nine. (Please, gentlemen, might I break in on this conversation? [on channel 19]) Go ahead, breaker. (Oh, by all means.) Hey J.B., you got your ears on? (You, sir, driving the J.B. Hunt truck, are you listening to your CB radio?) Ten-four. (Yes.). “Can I get a bear report?” (Are there any police behind you?) “Yeah, that town up ahead of you is crawling with local yokels.” (The town I just left has a number of municipal police looking for speeders.) …For an average motorist, tuning a CB radio to channel 19 for the first time is like being cured of life-long deafness – provided there are truckers nearby. The big rigs that loomed large and soulless suddenly have personalities emanating from them. Truckers with similar destinations will keep each other awake for hundreds of miles at a stretch, chatting about politics, religion, sex, sports, and working conditions. This provides hours of entertainment for those listeners who can penetrate the jargon and rich accents.

In 1781, John Witherspoon, a Scotsman who was President of Princeton, wrote, convincingly: The vulgar Americans speak much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason viz. that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.

By the twelfth century, writers from the regions around Paris—Picardy, Wallonie, Normandy, Champagne and Orléans—were making a conscious effort to eliminate dialectal characteristics in their writing so they could be understood by a larger number of people. However, regional influences did not disappear all at once. For example, Béroul’s Tristan et Iseut (Tristan and Isolde) was the work of a Norman-speaking trouvère (a troubadour of the north), whereas Chrétien de Troyes’s Romans de la table ronde (Stories of the Round Table) clearly shows accents of Champagne. Yet their writing shows they purposefully blurred dialectal differences. It was not the last time in the history of French that a group of writers would take the lead in hammering out the language. According to the French lexicographer Alain Rey, by the twelfth century this scripta—which Gaston Paris called Francien— already existed in an oral form among the lettrés (men and women of letters). But Francien took much longer to become a mother tongue. Somewhere between the beginning and the end of the second Hundred Years War (1337–1453), a significant part of the urban population of Paris had acquired a sort of common language they called Françoys, and each generation was transmitting more of this tongue to its children. Year after year its vocabulary widened beyond words for trade and domestic life. After millions of informal exchanges at all levels of society over centuries, this scripta finally became a common mother tongue.

In remote corners of East Anglia today, country folk still speak in a harsh, high-pitched, nasal accent unkindly called the “Norfolk whine.” This dialect is the survivor of a family of accents that were heard throughout the east of England in the seventeenth century, from the fens of east Lincolnshire to the coast of Kent.

But first a description: Clara Bowden was beautiful in all senses except maybe, by virtue of being black, the classical. Clara Bowden was magnificently tall, black as ebony and crushed sable, with hair plaited in a horseshoe which pointed up when she felt lucky, down when she didn’t. At this moment it was up. It is hard to know whether that was significant. She needed no bra – she was independent, even of gravity – she wore a red halterneck which stopped below her bust, underneath which she wore her belly button (beautifully) and underneath that some very tight yellow jeans. At the end of it all were some strappy heels of a light brown suede, and she came striding down the stairs on them like some kind of vision or, as it seemed to Archie as he turned to observe her, like a reared-up thoroughbred. Now, as Archie understood it, in movies and the like it is common for someone to be so striking that when they walk down the stairs the crowd goes silent. In life he had never seen it. But it happened with Clara Bowden. She walked down the stairs in slow motion, surrounded by afterglow and fuzzy lighting. And not only was she the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, she was also the most comforting woman he had ever met. Her beauty was not a sharp, cold commodity. She smelt musty, womanly, like a bundle of your favorite clothes. Though she was disorganized physically – legs and arms speaking a slightly different dialect from her central nervous system – even her gangly demeanour seemed to Archie exceptionally elegant. She wore her sexuality with an older woman’s ease, and not (as with most of the girls Archie had run with in the past) like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it or when to just put it down. ‘Cheer up, bwoy,’ she said in a lilting Caribbean accent that reminded Archie of That Jamaican Cricketer, ‘it might never happen.’ ‘I think it already has.’ Archie, who had just dropped a fag from his mouth which has been burning itself to death anyway, saw Clara quickly tread it underfoot. She gave him a wide grin that revealed possibly her one imperfection. A complete lack of teeth in the top of her mouth. ‘Man…dey get knock out,’ she lisped, seeing his surprise. ‘But I tink to myself: come de end of de world, d’Lord won’t mind if I have no toofs.’ She laughed softly.

He is notoriously difficult to understand both because of his strong accent and dialect, and because he has no teeth. Today he told me about a woman whose garden he works in once a week. According to Jock, she is not a very good driver because of her poor vision. "She got carrots in her eyes.

A couple of observations about the prophets’ promises regarding life in the age to come. First, they spoke about “all the nations.” That’s everybody. That’s all those different skin colors, languages, dialects, and accents; all those kinds of food and music; all those customs, habits, patterns, clothing, traditions, and ways of celebrating— multiethnic, multisensory, multieverything. That’s an extraordinarily complex, interconnected, and diverse reality, a reality in which individual identities aren’t lost or repressed, but embraced and celebrated. An expansive unity that goes beyond and yet fully embraces staggering levels of diversity.

Taxi drivers are some of my best friends in every city I visit. I wish to write a book on my encounters with taxi drivers in the Middle East one day. They see so much. They encounter all kinds of people. They learn to interact with people of different politics, backgrounds, gender, views, feelings, and even accents and dialects. In a sense, they are exposed to people in ways that any novelist, poet, anthropologist, or journalist would love to be. They are usually some of the best guides that hold the keys to the hidden secrets, especially the ‘dirty secrets’ of the cities where they live and work.

That’s mine.” She remembered her head jerking up upon picking up the marble, thinking the voice belonged to a rough Chinese merchant. Instead, she had been looking into a pale, young face with the features of a foreigner—a smorgasbord of sharp lines and wide, concerned eyes. The accent with which he spoke the local dialect was even better than hers, and her tutor had refused to speak anything except Shanghainese in case she forgot it. Juliette had rolled the marble into her palm, closing her fingers around it tightly. “It’s mine now.

So why am I writing a book using the Aramaic or Peshitta as a source? We must keep in mind that all translations of ancient texts are speculative in some manner. This is not to say they are not inspired; it is to just affirm that our translators and historians are not inspired. It behooves us to seek out whatever sources are available to us from the Greek and Aramaic to allow the Holy Spirit to guide us into an understanding of how the original text really read. Even if we had the original manuscripts, would we be able to really understand all the nuances and colloquial expressions that were prevalent in that day? Expressions such as Son of God and Son of Man need a first-century understanding. Even Nicodemus did not understand what Jesus meant by “you must be born again.” When Jesus and his disciples journeyed to the southern portion of Israel, their accents and use of idioms and colloquial expressions were quite pronounced. Nicodemus had a problem when Jesus said: mitheelidh min dresh (born again). The Southern dialect, which Nicodemus spoke, would have taken this literally as a physical birth. However, the Northern dialect would have expressed more of a broader range of meaning to include a spiritual rebirth. Ultimately, the Holy Spirit is our guide and teacher as we study the Word of God.

The song of the Canadian dialect is referred to, by linguists, as the Canadian rise. In the Canadian accent, there is a tonal rise at the end of each sentence, until the last sentence, which returns to the Canadian monotone. The rise at the end of the sentence is an indication that the speaker intends to continue. The end of the final sentence has no rise, which tells the listener, “Now it’s your turn to speak” … Essentially, we Canadians have encoded, “after you”, into our speech patterns. It’s subliminal etiquette.

Soon everyone spoke German the way Luther’s translation did. As television has had a homogenizing effect on the accents and dialects of Americans, watering down accents and sanding down sharp twangs, Luther’s Bible created a single German tongue.

Light pierced her eyes like a thousand needles. Shea stumbled, then felt a strong hand close like a vise around her upper arm, preventing her from falling. Murmuring a thank you, she fumbled in her pocket for her dark glasses to cover her streaming eyes. “What are you doing here alone, unprotected?” The voice was pitched low, the dialect and accent eerily similar to Jacques’. Shea’s breath caught in her throat, and she struggled for release. The tall, dark-haired man merely pushed her into the shadows, her back to the wall of the building, his large frame easily blocking hers. “Who are you?” he asked. “You are small and fair for one of us.” His hand caught her chin so that she met the penetration of his sunglass-shaded eyes. “Your scent is familiar to me but elusive. How is it I did not know of your existence?” For just a moment satisfaction curved his mouth. “You are free. That is good.” “I don’t know you, sir, and you’re scaring me. I’m in a great hurry, so please let me go.” Shea used her coolest, most disdainful voice, and she deliberately spoke English. The man was enormously strong, and it terrified her. “I am Byron.” He gave only his first name, as if that should be enough. “I am a male of our race, you a single female. The sun is climbing, and you did not give yourself enough time to seek refuge from the dawn. I can do no other than help you, offer my protection.” He switched easily to heavily accented English. His voice seemed to slide right inside her. He gave the illusion of being a gentleman, so friendly, yet he had not released her or moved even an inch to allow her to get by him. He inhaled, dragged her scent into his lungs. Suddenly his entire demeanor changed. His body stiffened. His fingers dug into her arm. White teeth gleamed a predator’s flash of warning. “Why did you not answer me when I spoke to you?

To Morton Stone, all those first weeks at Meerlust had a strange, dream-like quality. The contours and smells of the country, the odd style of the house’s architecture, the stinkwood furniture and ancient brass with which its rooms were furnished, had an exotic flavour that left him slightly bewildered. They didn’t, naturally, bewilder Catherine at all. She was rapturously recapturing the days when she and Hans had been children together. To Morton there was something beautiful, and at the same time pathetic, in the quickness with which she responded to each remembered detail: the bird-song, the flowers that now bloomed in incredible profusion, the smell of the veld, the soft accents of Cape-Dutch dialect. It was pathetic for two reasons. First because these memories, which he could neither share nor understand, increased the distance between them; once again, because all her rapture was shadowed for him by the gloom of an in- definite apprehensiveness. This very excess of happiness took it out of her. She wasn’t, as he could see, and as the Malans’ Dutch doctor told him, any better for the change. It seemed to spur her to a morbid restlessness. She was catching at every memory, within, or just out of reach, as though some inward consciousness told her that the time for its enjoyment was limited. It irked her to find him, as it seemed to her, dull and unresponsive. As for Morton, the sense of impending disaster never left him. He could have faced it more easily, he felt, at home, amid familiar surroundings, than in this strange, unreal oasis of beauty, five thousand miles from anywhere.