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John Mcwhorter Quotes


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Quotes by John Mcwhorter

Showing 11-20 of 20 Quotes by John Mcwhorter

The only way that residual racist feelings could affect legislation, in my opinion, is through a lack of priorities, from not doing things.

~John Mcwhorter

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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 Mcwhorter

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The contribution of West African languages to Ebonics is absolutely infinitesimal. What it actually is is a very interesting hybrid of regional dialects of Great Britain that slaves in America were exposed to because they often worked alongside the indentured servants who spoke those dialects that we often learn about in school.

~John Mcwhorter

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Black English is something which - it's a natural system in itself. And even though it is a dialect of English, it can be very difficult for people who don't speak it, or who haven't been raised in it, to understand when it's running by quickly, spoken in particular by young men colloquially to each other. So that really is an issue.

~John Mcwhorter

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Texting is fingered speech. Now we can write the way we talk.

~John Mcwhorter

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People banging away on their smartphones are fluently using a code separate from the one they use in actual writing, but a code it is, to which linguists are currently devoting articles.

~John Mcwhorter

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People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

~John Mcwhorter

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Most languages spoken by a few thousand people are so complicated they make your head swim; a Siberian yak herder's language is much more complicated than a Manhattan bond trader's.

~John Mcwhorter

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

~John Mcwhorter

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As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

~John Mcwhorter

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Writer

Born: Unknown

Links

Find John Mcwhorter on Amazon

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