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 Read Quote
As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it’s going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke. John McWhorter Read Quote
LOL’ is one of several texting expressions that convey nuance in a system where you don’t have the voice and face to do it the way you normally would. John McWhorter Read Quote
Every third person in the world is a drama queen. And crying ‘victim,’ especially when you’re not really a victim in any real way, feels good. It feels good to cry victim if you’re not one. John McWhorter Read Quote
As far as I’m concerned, and this is a big theme of mine, I’m not interested in white people loving me. It’s an unrealistic expectation. Black people don’t love anybody but themselves. John McWhorter Read Quote
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 Read Quote
As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer. John McWhorter Read Quote
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 Read 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 McWhorter Read Quote
