A Quote by Robert Burchfield

I am sure that the two main forms of English, American English and British English, separated geographically from the beginning and severed politically since 1776, are continuing to move apart, and that existing elements of linguistic dissimilarity between them will intensify as time goes on, notwithstanding the power of the cinema, TV, Time Magazine, and other two-way gluing and fuelling devices.

Robert Burchfield

Quote Topics

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Quote Author

Robert Burchfield
English - Scientist
January 27, 1923 - July 5, 2004

Well, English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent. Obviously there are more specific ones that get a little bit tricky. Same with American stuff. But because in Australia we're so inundated with American culture, television, this that and the other, everyone in Australia can do an American accent. It's just second nature.

Guy Pearce

English is no problem for me because I am actually English. My whole family are English; I was brought up listening to various forms of the English accent.

Guy Pearce

The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.

Will Self

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

Maurice Druon

A lot of the demos I write are all in English, so releasing music in English isn't translating to English, it's just keeping them in English.

Henry Lau

You will hear people say the C-word. Except, it's a regional language: in British English, c - t has much less of an inflammatory sense than it does in North American English. You can hear someone on British TV called "a c - ting monkey" or a man being called a c - t. The particular fascination of profanity is how culturally specific it is and how it evolves.

Kory Stamper

Not long time ago there was a striking example of the extent to which English has diverged: a television company put out a programme filmed in the English city of Newcastle, where the local variety of English is famously divergent and difficult, and the televised version was accompanied by English subtitles!

Larry Trask

However good an English team is, they will always have an additional advantage. It is that European players know that their English opponents will come at them in the belief they will win, and they can always be guaranteed never to stop fighting. They have a natural aggression that they are born with. If it ever goes, English football will lose its most valuable dimension.

Johan Cruijff

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

In October 1920 I went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, with a free commission to develop the linguistic side of a large and growing School of English Studies, in which no regular provision had as yet been made for the linguistic specialist.

J. R. R. Tolkien

There are 3 basic differences between we British and you Americans. One, we speak English, and you don't. Two, when we have a "World Championship", we invite teams from other nations. Three, when you meet the British head of State, you only have to get down on one knee.

John Cleese

. . . the fact that [English] has shed most of the old grammatical forms which time has rendered useless and scarcely intelligible, has made English a model, pointing the way which must be followed in building the Interlanguage. . .

Sylvia Pankhurst

The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass

Virginia Woolf

I think in Arabic at times, but when I'm writing it's all in English. And I don't try to make my English sound more Arabic, because it would be phony - I'm imagining Melanie Griffith trying to do a German accent in Shining Through. It just wouldn't work. But the language in my head is a specific kind of English. It's not exactly American, not exactly British. Because everything is filtered through me, through my experience. I'm Lebanese, but not that much. American, but not that much. Gay, but not that much. The only thing I'm sure of, really, is that I'm under 5'7".

Rabih Alameddine

We do not for example say that the person has a perfect knowledge of some language L similar to English but still different from it. What we say is that the child or foreigner has a 'partial knowledge of English' or is 'on his or her way' towards acquiring knowledge of English, and if they reach this goal, they will then know English.