The Power of Babel Quotes

“Language overlaps with culture but is not subsumed by it”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Because all languages are and have always been in a state of continual transformation, anything we see in a language today is the result of change.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Don’t tell the Scandinavians I said this, but “Swedish,” “Norwegian,” and “Danish” are all really one “language,”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“there is no such thing as human beings speaking “bad grammar.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“the social evaluations we place on how people talk are purely artificial constructs placed on speech varieties”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“This cycle eloquently demonstrates that, in the end, dialects are all there is: the “language” part is just politics!”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Now independent, the Moldovans continue to encourage a perception of “Moldovan” as a distinct “language” from Romanian, in part because Romanians tend to dismiss their dialect as sounding uneducated.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Today’s “Dialect” Is Tomorrow’s “Language”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“In Greenlandic Eskimo, “I should stop drinking” is Iminngernaveersaartunngortussaavunga”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“This was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with foreign languages.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“We saw how close dialects can be compared to “covers” of an original song. A”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“view the world’s six thousand languages as accumulations of endless transformations of the single African progenitor of all of them.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“the grand old tendency in sound change to erode unaccented final vowels”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Language change, to the extent that we can perceive it, appears to be decay.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“most of the languages that now exist are almost certain to become extinct within this century.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“mere one percent of the words in English today are not borrowed from other languages.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“the first human language emerged roughly 150,000 years ago in East Africa.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“is evidence that human language is to some extent genetically coded.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“There is a vast gulf in complexity, subtlety, and flexibility between human beings and other animals in regard to language ability, and that gulf is a large part of why humans have been such a successful species of such disproportionate influence on this planet.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“However, human language is unique in its ability to communicate or convey an open-ended volume of concepts:”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Just as we would be inestimably poorer to be denied the opportunity to see giraffes, roses, bombardier beetles, tulips, and little black house cats with white spots on their chests that sit on our laps as we write, we lose one of the true wonders of the world every time one of these glorious variations on a theme set by the first language slips away unrecorded for posterity.”
― John McWhorter, The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language – A Witty Linguistics Guide to How Tongues Mix, Mutate, and Evolve

“the eight main “dialects” of Chinese are so vastly different that they are, under any analysis, separate languages. The”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“is no logical conception of “language” as “proper” speech as distinguished from “quaint,” “broken” varieties best kept down on the farm or over on the other side of the tracks.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“the concept of “language” is a mere terminological convenience.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Even Fijian, spoken on a complex of islands by just seven hundred thousand people, has more than one dialect.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Each dialect is just a different roll of the language-mutation dice.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“English is one of several languages that evolved from an unwritten ancestor linguists call Proto-Germanic;”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“Dialects follow naturally from the inherently nondiscrete nature of language change.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“will end up being a kind of mantra for this chapter, “dialects is all there is.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language

“More to the point, though, a language consists not only of isolated words but also sounds and sentence structures, and these are at all times changing along with the word meanings.”
― John McWhorter, The Power Of Babel: A Natural History of Language