McWhorter — The Power of Babel
Book page: mcwhorter-power-babel
From: Quotes batch 14
Edition: Times Books (2001)
On Language and Society
“A language is a dialect with an army and a navy. It is a social decision to call one way of speaking ‘correct’ and another ‘broken’.” (p. 7)
On Cognition
“Our brains don’t store language as a stagnant list; they treat it as a living, breathing organism that evolves with every conversation.” (p. 245)