If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.

My accent is... sort of an Edinburgh sort of soft southwest Scottish accent. It could almost be English.

Indian nouns are extremely connotative; that is, the name does more than simply denote the thing to which it belongs - in denoting the object, it also assigns to it some quality or characteristic.

We've been using 'rejuvenate,' meaning to restore youth, to make young again, as a verb for at least 200 years.

Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

The first of these phases is that of grammar, invented by the Greeks and carried on unchanged by the French. It never had any philosophical view of a language as such.

There's an old little jingle: 'The chief use of slang is to show that you're one of the gang.' What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there's a group...

Like Humpty Dumpty, we can make words mean anything we want them to mean.

I probably spoke Spanish growing up about 95 percent of the time.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

Rhythm and sounds are born with syllables.

Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.

Semantics, or the study of meaning, remained undeveloped, while phonetics made rapid progress and even came to occupy the central place in the scientific study of language.

These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

One of the important things about familiar form and metricality is that it draws attention to the physical nature of language: the spell-binding nature of it and the ceremony of articulation.

What you hear is southern Michigan, not a drawl, but a halting kind of speech where you leave spaces when there shouldn't be any. We take a breath anywhere.

People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyze it, you find they're not.

He who does not understand a joke, he does not understand Danish.