Dialect quotes
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I had a dialect coach to get an American accent, and then another dialect coach to come off it a bit. There is something deep and mysterious in the voice when it isn't too high-pitched American.
-- Archie Panjabi -
The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to.
-- Audra McDonald -
I always say if you're going to do a movie about Charles de Gaulle get a Frenchman, you know. I'm not French. And yeah, sure I could get with a dialect coach and work for six months trying to talk like a Frenchman. But there's some French actors. Just get one of them, you know.
-- Billy Bob Thornton -
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.
-- Brion James -
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At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.
-- David Crystal -
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.
-- David Foster Wallace -
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.
-- David Tang -
I sat staring, staring, staring - half lost, learning a new language or rather the same language in a different dialect.
-- Emily Carr -
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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,
-- Glenn Quinn -
"...light-skinned," and with "no negro dialect."
-- Harry Reid -
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.
-- Ishmael Beah -
[On The Philippines:] ... eighty dialects and languages are spoken; we are a fragmented nation of loyal believers, divided by blood feuds and controlled by the Church.
-- Jessica Hagedorn -
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Was there a language of loss? Did everyone who suffered speak a different dialect?
-- Jodi Picoult -
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.
-- John H. McWhorter -
Each dancer has a different dialect that they speak.
-- Jon M. Chu -
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.
-- Judith Lynne Hanna -
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I have a dialect myself; it's more pronounced, because I have studied theatre and been in England. It's half-British, half-Indian.
-- Kunal Nayyar -
I am very good with dialects, but the two that I can't do for some reason are the South African and Australian.
-- Liev Schreiber -
The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.
-- Lister Sinclair -
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.
-- Luke Pasqualino -
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The accent got lost somewhere along the way. I'm a little embarrassed about it. When I arrived in LA I assumed I'd be able to put on the American accent. It proved difficult so I had six months working with a dialect coach and it's become a habit.
-- Martin Henderson -
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.
-- Patricia Hampl -
Actors love mental disorders, dialects, and corsets. Give them one of the three and they're happy
-- Robin Tunney -
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.
-- Thomas Bailey Aldrich -
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Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.
-- William Labov -
This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.
-- William Labov -
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.
-- Geoff Zanelli -
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.
-- John Lloyd Young -
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A non-standard dialect is as valid communication system as the standard
-- Kate Burridge -
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.
-- Robin Atkin Downes -
Dialect or the speech of the people is capable of expressing whatever the people are.
-- Sterling K. Brown -
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.
-- Daniel Kehlmann -
