Standard English Quotes

• 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

  America, Vocabulary, Different

  56 Copy quote

• Where shall we look for standard English, but to the words of a standard man?

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Looks, Language

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “The Essential Thoreau”, p.516, Simon and Schuster

  52 Copy quote

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• Because of the way our society is structures, using sentences such as "I don't it" can put people at a disadvantage. And this is, of course, why teachers have to give students access to Standard English, in order to protect them against this sort of prejudice.

  Kate Burridge

  Teacher, Order, People

  28 Copy quote

• That mainstream English is essential to our self-preservation is indisputable . . . but it is not necessary to abandon Spoken Soul to master Standard English, any more than it is necessary to abandon English to learn French or to deprecate jazz to appreciate classical music.

  John R. Rickford

  Self, Appreciate, Soul

  8 Copy quote

• I've come across a novel called The Palm-Wine Drinkard, by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, that is really remarkable because it is a kind of fantasy of West African mythology all told in West African English which, of course, is not the same as standard English.

  William Golding

  Wine, West, Fantasy

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.

  Lawrence Venuti

  Interesting, Receiving, Culture

  9 Copy quote

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

  John H. McWhorter

  Thinking, People, Black

  6 Copy quote

• Once, BBC television had echoed BBC radio in being a haven for standard English pronunciation. Then regional accents came in: a democratic plus. Then slipshod usage came in: an egalitarian minus. By now slovenly grammar is even more rife on the BBC channels than on ITV. In this regard a decline can be clearly charted... If the BBC, once the guardian of the English language, has now become its most implacable enemy, let us at least be grateful when the massacre is carried out with style.

  Clive James

  Grateful, Style, Enemy

  4 Copy quote