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Sociolinguist Inspirational Quotes (49)

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An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.
William Labov
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Well, American dialects have been studied for a hundred years or so.
William Labov
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But unlike European countries, America has never finished a map of the United States, only the eastern United States is covered and a few spots here and there.
William Labov
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Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
David Crystal
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Fashion is custom in the guise of departure from custom
Edward Sapir
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As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
David Crystal
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Nonverbal communication is an elaborate secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.
Edward Sapir
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Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.
David Crystal
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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.
William Labov
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Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.
Edward Sapir
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The psychology of a language which, in one way or another, is imposed upon one because of factors beyond one's control, is very different from the psychology of a language which one accepts of one's free will.
Edward Sapir
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I am convinced that the stratigraphic method will in the future enable archaeology to throw far more light on the history of American culture than it has done in the past.
Edward Sapir
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Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.
David Crystal
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It is no secret that the fruits of language study are in no sort of relation to the labour spent on teaching and learning them.
Edward Sapir
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Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
David Crystal
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Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
David Crystal
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A second type of direct evidence is formed by statements, whether as formal legends or personal information, regarding the age or relative sequence of events in tribal history made by the natives themselves.
Edward Sapir
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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.
William Labov
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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
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Were a language ever completely grammatical it would be a perfect engine of conceptual expression. Unfortunately, or luckily, no language is tyrannically consistent. All grammars leak.
Edward Sapir
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A firm, for instance, that does business in many countries of the world is driven to spend an enormous amount of time, labour, and money in providing for translation services.
Edward Sapir
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Cultural anthropology is not valuable because it uncovers the archaic in the psychological sense. It is valuable because it is constantly rediscovering the normal.
Edward Sapir
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It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.
Edward Sapir
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Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.
Edward Sapir
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