Dialect Quotes

“Regret and remorse” is a dialectic issue about what has been done, about what should have been done and about what should not have been done. ( “Island of regret. Island of remorse” )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“In the philosophical dialect, a cynic takes an insult as a compliment since opposition is already his style.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“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.”
― Patrick Ness, The Knife of Never Letting Go

“Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“The goblins have been after me ever since I helped the Coven drive them out of Essex. (They were gobbling up drunk people in club bathrooms, and the Mage was worried about losing regional slang.) I think the goblin who successfully offs me gets to be king.”
― Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

“إذَا اسْتَبْدَلَ القَوْمُ لُغَتَهُمْ بالعَامِّيَّةِ، آلُوا إلى التَّخَلُّفِ والمَذَلَّةِ وَالهَاوِيَةِ”
― Mouloud Benzadi , Riyahelkadar رواية رياح القدر

“Never let it be said that dialect is a reflection of intellect.
On the contrary, it is a reflection of the deep traditional values of a culture that respects family, God, and a
language system above everything else. I give thanks to my maker that I’m a Southern woman.”
― Patricia H. Graham

“The sky blue blue, Mr. Wiggins.”
― Ernest J. Gaines, A Lesson Before Dying

“The study of Scripture I find to be quite like mastering an instrument. No one is so good that they cannot get any better; no one knows so much that they can know no more. A professional can spot an amateur or a lack of practice or experience a mile away. His technicality, his spiritual ear is razor-sharp. He is familiar with the common mistakes, the counter-arguments; and insofar as this, he can clearly distinguish the difference between honest critics of the Faith and mere fools who criticize that which they know nothing.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“In many a case, the phrase ‘I’d like to get to know you better’ is a euphemism for ‘I want us to fuck.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Est-il préférable pour une société de parler une langue commune ou de maintenir plusieurs langues en même temps?
Les personnes vivant dans une société multilingue sont souvent confrontées au dilemme de choisir la langue à utiliser.
Par conséquent, il est crucial d'avoir une langue commune au sein d'une nation, car le multilinguisme peut entraîner des malentendus, de la confusion et des divisions.
Il n'est donc pas étonnant que les premières tentatives de créer une langue commune remontent à l'Antiquité, lorsque les anciens Grecs qualifiaient de "barbares" (barbaros) ceux qui ne parlaient pas le grec.”
― Mouloud Benzadi

“I believe that virtue shows quite as well in rags and patches as she does in purple and fine linen,... even if Gargery and Boffin did not speak like gentlemen, they were gentlemen.”
― Charles Dickens

“A little later, as we talked of the Maniot dirges by which I was obsessed, I was surprised to hear this bloodshot-eyed and barefoot old man say: “Yes, it’s the old iambic tetrameter acalectic.” It was the equivalent of a Cornish fisherman pointing out the difference, in practicality incomprehensible dialect, between the Petrachian and the Spenserian sonnet. It was quite correct. Where on earth had he learnt it? His last bit of information was that, in the old days (that wonderful cupboard!) the Arabs used to come to this coast to dive for the murex.”
― Patrick Leigh Fermor, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese

“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”
― Rosina Lippi-Green

“Mm, you're nice to croodle wi'," he murmured, doing what I assumed was croodling.”
― Diana Gabaldon, Outlander

“The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.

In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.

All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.

I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.”
― Kurt Vonnegut

“Up and down' is Irish for anything at all--from crying into the dishes to full-blown psychosis. Though, now that I think about, a psychotic is more usually 'not quite herself'.”
― Anne Enright, Yesterday's Weather

“From time to time, her dialogue will be rendered in ordinary English, which Louise does not speak. To do full justice to her speech would require a ladder of footnotes and glosses, a tic of apostrophes (aphaeresis, hyphaeresis, apocope), and a Louise-ese/English dictionary of phonetic spellings.”
― Fran Ross, Oreo

“To creative people, the compendium of the white man's dialect are unfashionable, because their creations are more than what the tongue could say.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson

“In fact, when you think about it, if a word from the street occurs in a book it is not the writer who is guilty, but the readers, and primarily those readers belonging to the upper classes: for they are the ones who will never utter a single decent Russian word; their speech is so abundantly stuffed with every manner of French, German, and English words that you want to block your ears...”
― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls

“He’s more a shape in a drape than a hep cat”
― Sara Sheridan, London Calling

“The unexpected dinner invitation from the budgerow started Mr Doughty off on a journey of garrulous reminiscence. 'Oh my boy!' said the pilot to Zachary, as they stood leaning on the deck rail. 'The old Raja of Raskhali: I could tell you a story or two about him--Rascally-Roger I used to call him!' He laughed, thumping the deck with his cane. 'Now there was a lordly nigger if ever you saw one! Best kind of native--kept himself busy with his shrub and his nautch-girls and his tumashers. Wasn't a man in town who could put on a burra-khana like he did. Sheeshmull blazing with shammers and candles. Paltans of bearers and khidmutgars. Demijohns of French loll-shrub and carboys of iced simkin. And the karibat! In the old days the Rascally bobachee-connah was the best in the city. No fear of pishpash and cobbily-mash at the Rascally table. The dumbpokes and pillaus were good enough, but we old hands, we'd wait for the curry of cockup and the chitchky of pollock-saug. Oh he set a rankin table I can tell you--and mind you, supper was just the start: the real tumasher came later, in the nautch-connah. Now there was another chuckmuck sight for you! Rows of cursies for the sahibs and mems to sit on. Sittringies and tuckiers for the natives. The baboos puffing at their hubble-bubbles and the sahibs lighting their Sumatra buncuses. Cunchunees whirling and tickytaw boys beating their tobblers. Oh, that old loocher knew how to put on a nautch all right! He was a sly little shaytan too, the Rascally-Roger: if he saw you eyeing one of the pootlies, he'd send around a khidmutgar, bobbing and bowing, the picture of innocence. People would think you'd eaten one too many jellybees and needed to be shown to the cacatorium. But instead of the tottee-connah, off you'd go to a little hidden cumra, there to puckrow your dashy. Not a memsahib present any the wiser--and there you were, with your gobbler in a cunchunee's nether-whiskers, getting yourself a nice little taste of a blackberry-bush.' He breathed a nostalgic sigh. 'Oh they were grand old goll-mauls, those Rascally burra-khanas! No better place to get your tatters tickled.'
Zachary nodded, as if no word of this had escaped him.”
― Amitav Ghosh

“This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.”
― Petina Gappah, The Book of Memory

“Tha didn't mek it, did tha, luv,
Our gowden weddin' day.
Wi tried so hard to keep thi,
But tha quietly slipped away.

It's fifty years ago to-day
Sin' ah become thi bride,
Ah'd give everythin' in t'world, mi luv,
To have thi by mi side.

But there, it seems 'twere noan fer t'be
But ah seems to hear thi say,
"Durn't fret, mi lass, just carry on,
We'll meet agen some day.”
― Louisa Bearman, Poems in the Lancashire Dialect

“Never could Mathias give the right answer, but always had he an excuse for being wrong.

"I was just a thinkin'," he'd fend himself. "If I hadn't been a thinkin', I wouldn't a thought that way.”
― Conrad Richter, The Fields

“During my first semester on campus, I was pretty shocked at how open everything was. I'd hear girls in the dorm talking about hooking up with guys they just met, and I wasn't even totally sure what that meant. Half the time, I'm still not sure, because it seems like different people mean different things. To some, it's just making out, but to others, it means sleeping with someone, and to others something in between, if you know what I mean. I spent a big chunk of my freshman year trying to unscramble the code.”
― Nicholas Sparks, The Longest Ride