English

Samples

Dialect: Old English
Authors: Unknown
Source: Transcript of part of a poem, The Battle of Maldon, in indeterminate Anglo-Saxon: the original manuscript was part of a collection belonging to Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, which was destroyed in a fire in 1731
Translator: Sandy Fleming

Author: Geoffrey Chaucer (1340~45–1400)
Source: “The Prologe of the Wyves Tale of Bathe” (The Prologue of the Woman of Bath’s Tale), The Canterbury Tales
Translator: Reinhard F. Hahn

Dialect: Formal Elizabethan English
Translators: various
Source: John 11:30–35 of the King James Bible, this text from an early 19th century family Bible, as appointed to be read in churches.

30 Now Jesus was not yet come into the town, but was in that place where Martha met him.
31 The Jews then which were with her in the house, and comforted her, when they saw Mary, that she rose hastily and went out, followed her, saying, She goeth unto the grave to weep there.
32 Then when Mary was come where Jesus was, and saw him, she fell down at his feet, saying unto him, Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had not died.
33 When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled,
34 And said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see.
35 Jesus wept.

Dialect: Formal Augustan English (England)
Author: Laurence Sterne
Source: Tristram Shandy, first published 1759–1767

—UPON my honour, Sir, you have tore every bit of the skin quite off the back of both my hands with your forceps, cried my uncle Toby,—and you have crushed all my knuckles into the bargain with them, to a jelly. ’Tis your own fault, said Dr Slop,—you should have clinched your two fists together into the form of a child’s head, as I told you, and sat firm.—I did so, answered my uncle Toby.—Then the points of my forceps have not been sufficiently armed, or the rivet wants closing—or else the cut on my thumb has made me a little awkward,—or possibly—’Tis well, quoth my father, interrupting the detail of possibilities,—that the experiment was not first made upon my child’s head piece.
—It would not have been a cherry-stone the worse, answered Dr Slop.—I maintain it, said my uncle Toby, it would have broke the cerebellum, (unless indeed the skull had been as hard as a granado) and turned it all into a perfect posset. Pshaw! replied Dr Slop, a child’s head is naturally as soft as the pap of an apple;—the sutures give way,—and besides, I could have extracted by the feet after.—Not you, said she.—I rather wish you would begin that way, quoth my father.
Pray do, added my uncle Toby.

Dialect: Georgian English (England)
Author: Jane Austen
Source: Pride and Prejudice, 1813

‘I have not the pleasure of understanding you,’ said he, when she had finished her speech. ‘Of what are you talking?’
‘Of Mr Collins and Lizzy. Lizzy declares she will not have Mr Collins, and Mr Collins begins to say that he will not have Lizzy.’
‘And what am I to do on the occasion?—It seems an hopeless business.’
‘Speak to Lizzy about it yourself. Tell her that you insist upon her marrying him.’
‘Let her be called down. She shall hear my opinion.’
Mrs Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.
‘Come here, child,’ cried her father as she appeared. ‘I have sent for you on an affair of importance. I understand that Mr Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is it true?’ Elizabeth replied that it was. ‘Very well – and this offer of marriage you have refused?’
‘I have, Sir.’
‘Very well. We now come to the point. Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is not it so, Mrs Bennet?’
‘Yes, or I will never see her again.’
‘An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth. From this day you must be a stranger to one of your parents.—Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do.’
Elizabeth could not but smile at such a conclusion of such a beginning; but Mrs Bennet, who had persuaded herself that her husband regarded the affair as she wished, was excessively disappointed.

Dialect: Formal Victorian English (London)
Authors: George and Weedon Grossmith
Source: “The Diary of a Nobody”, initially serialised in Punch magazine, May 1888 to May 1889.

I turned round suddenly, and then I saw Mr. Perkupp standing half-way in the door, he having arrived without our knowing it. I beckoned to Carrie, and we went up to him at once. He would not come right into the room. I apologised for the foolery, but Mr. Perkupp said: ‘Oh, it seems amusing.’
I could see he was not a bit amused.
Carrie and I took him downstairs, but the table was a wreck. There was not a glass of champagne left—not even a sandwich. Mr. Perkupp said he required nothing, but would like a glass of seltzer or soda water. The last syphon was empty. Carrie said: ‘We have plenty of port wine left.’ Mr. Perkupp said with a smile: ‘No, thank you. I really require nothing, but I am most pleased to see you and your husband in your own home. Good-night Mrs. Pooter—you will excuse my very short stay, I know.’ I went with him to his carriage, and he said: ‘Don’t trouble to come to the office till twelve to-morrow.’
I felt despondent as I went back to the house, and I told Carrie I thought the party was a failure. Carrie said it was a great success, and I was only tired, and insisted on my having some port myself. I drank two glasses, and felt much better, and we went into the drawing-room, where they had commenced dancing. Carrie and I had a little dance, which I said reminded me of old days. She said I was a spooney old thing. 

Dialect: Nigerian English (of an Ibo)
Author: Flora Nwapa
Source: “This is Lagos”, 1971, in This Is Lagos and Other Stories (Africa Women Writers Series), 1991

‘You hear, Mr. Ibikunle, we don’t marry like that in my home,’ Mama Eze said. ‘Home people will not regard you as married. This is unheard of. And you tell me this is what the white people do. So when white people wish to marry, they don’t seek the consent of their parents, they don’t even inform them. My sister’s daughter,’ she turned to Soha, ‘you have not done well. You have rewarded me with evil. Why did you not take me into confidence? Am I not married? Is marriage a sin? Will I prevent you from marrying? Isn’t it the prayer of every woman?
‘It is enough Mama Eze,’ Mama Bisi said. ‘And besides...’
‘You women talk too much. Mr Ibikunle has acted like a gentleman. What if he had run away after pregnating Soha. What would you do?’” 

Dialect: South African English
Author: Mark Behr
Source: The Smell of Apples, New York: Picador, 1995

We see the old man walking towards us from the direction of Kalk Bay. He bends forward, and picks up an empty Coke bottle from the water drain. At first we don’t pay him any attention, but then I recognise him: it’s Chrisjan. Its the first time I’ve seen him since he walked off with our fishing gear. He’s wandering along with his eyes on the pavement, and it seems like he’s looking for something.
Dag, Chrisjan, I say, from where Frikkie and I are sitting on the pavement. He comes to a sudden standstill, and tries to straighten his shoulders.
Afternoon, my Crown. Doesn’t the Crown have a little loose something for an old man? The hunger is eating at the stomach.
He’s acting as if he doesnt recognise me. But he has to know me. After all, he worked in our garden for thirty years, first for Oupa and then for us. He bends forward, holding out his palm like a bergie. Dad usually gives them money, but I haven’t got any for him. And anyway, Chrisjan isn’t a bergie, he’s simply unreliable and on top of that he’s a thief. 

Dag = ‘Good day!’, ‘Hi!’
Oupa = Grandpa
bergie = scavenger, beggar

Dialect: Scottish English (Edinburgh)
Author: Muriel Spark
Source: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1961

‘We turn to the right,’ said Miss Brodie.
They approached the Old Town which none of the girls had properly seen before, because none of their parents was so historically minded as to be moved to conduct their young into the reeking network of slums which the Old Town constituted in those years. The Canongate, The Grassmarket, The Lawnmarket, were names which betokened a misty region of crime and desperation: ‘Lawnmarket Man Jailed.’ Only Eunice Gardiner and Monica Douglas had already traversed the High Street on foot on the Royal Mile from the Castle or Holyrood. Sandy had been taken to Holyrood in an uncle’s car and had seen the bed, too short and too broad, where Mary Queen of Scots had slept, and the tiny room, smaller than their own scullery at home, where the Queen had played cards with Rizzio.
Now they were in a great square, the Grassmarket, with the Castle, which was in any case everywhere, rearing between a big gap in the houses where the aristocracy used to live. It was Sandy’s first experience of a foreign country, which intimates itself by its new smells and shapes and its new poor. A man sat on the icy-cold pavement; he just sat.
A crowd of children, some without shoes, were playing some fight game, and some boys shouted after Miss Brodie’s violet-clad company, with words that the girls had not heard before, but rightly understood to be obscene. Children and women with shawls came in and out of the dark closes. Sandy found she was holding Mary’s hand in her bewilderment, all the girls were holding hands, while Miss Brodie talked of history. Into the High Street, and ‘John Knox,’ said Miss Brodie, ‘was an embittered man. He could never be at ease with the gay French Queen. We of Edinburgh owe a lot to the French. We are Europeans.’ The smell was amazingly terrible. In the middle of the road farther up the High Street a crowd was gathered. ‘Walk past quietly,’ said Miss Brodie.
A man and a woman stood in the midst of the crowd which had formed a ring round them. They were shouting at each other and the man hit the woman twice across the head. Another woman, very little, with cropped black hair, a red face and a big mouth, came forward and took the man by the arm. She said:
‘I’ll be your man.’
From time to time throughout her life Sandy pondered this, for she was certain that the little woman’s words were ‘I’ll be your man’, not ‘I’ll be your woman’, and it was never explained.

Dialect: Synthetic English, suggesting gangster-speak (USA)
Author: Damon Runyan
Source: Dancing Dan’s Christmas, 1932

And once we are somewhat embarrassed when a lot of little kids going home with their parents from a late Christmas party somewhere gather about Santa Claus with shouts of childish glee, and some of them wish to climb up Santa Claus’s legs. Naturally, Santa Claus gets a little peevish, and calls them a few names, and one of the parents comes up and wishes to know what is the idea of Santa Claus using such language, and Santa Claus takes a punch at the parent, all of which is no doubt most astonishing to the little kids who have an idea of Santa Claus as a very kindly old guy. But of course they do not know about Dancing Dan mixing the liquor we get in the spots we visit with his Tom and Jerry, or they will understand how even Santa Claus can lose his temper.
Well, finally we arrive in front of the place where Dancing Dan says Miss Muriel O’Neill and her grandmamma lives and it is nothing but a tenement house lot far back of Madison Square Garden, and furthermore it is a walk-up, and at this time there are no lights burning in the joint except a gas jet in the main hall, and by the light of this jet we look at the names on the letter-boxes, such as you always find in the hall of these joints, and we see that Miss Muriel O’Neill and her grandmamma live on the fifth floor.
This is the top floor, and personally I do not like the idea of walking up five flights of stair, and I am willing to let Dancing Dan and Good Time Charley go, but Dancing Dan insists we must all go, and finally I agree because Charley is commencing to argue that the right way for us to do is to get on the roof and let Santa Claus go down a chimney, and is making so much noise I am afraid he will wake somebody up.

Dialect: 20th Century English (USA)
Author: James Thurber
Source: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, in My World – and Welcome to It, 1937

When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him, twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town—he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. ‘Where’s the what’s-its-name?’ she would ask. ‘Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-its-name.’ A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.
‘Perhaps this will refresh your memory.’ The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’ Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. ‘This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,’ he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order. ‘You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?’ said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. ‘Objection!’ shouted Mitty’s attorney. ‘We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.’ Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. ‘With any known make of gun,’ he said evenly, ‘I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.’ Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. ‘You miserable cur!’ .
‘Puppy biscuit,’ said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him again. A woman who was passing laughed. ‘He said “Puppy biscuit”, she said to her companion. ‘That man said “Puppy biscuit” to himself.’

Dialect: Colloquial 20th Century English (USA)
Author: J. D. Salinger
Source: Catcher in the Rye, 1945

‘You’re a very good conversationalist,’ I told her. ‘You know that?’
‘What?’
I let it drop. It was over her head, anyway. ‘Do you feel like jitterbugging a little bit, if they play a fast one? Not corny jitterbug, not jump or anything - just nice and easy. Everybody’ll all sit down when they play a fast one, except the old guys and the fat guys, and we’ll have plenty of room. Okay?’
‘It’s immaterial to me,’ she said. ‘Hey—how old are you, anyhow?’
That annoyed me, for some reason. ‘Oh, Christ. Don’t spoil it,’ I said. ‘I’m twelve, for Chrissake. I’m big for my age.’
‘Listen. I toleja about that. I don’t like that type language,’ she said. ‘If you’re gonna use that type language, I can go sit down with my girl friends, you know.’
I apologized like a madman, because the band was starting a fast one. She started jitterbugging with me—but just very nice and easy, not corny. She was really good. All you had to do was touch her. And when she turned around, her pretty little butt twitched so nice and all. She knocked me out. I mean it. I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they’re not much to look at, or even if they’re sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can.

Dialect: Affected 20th Century English (Russian expatriate)
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Source: Lolita, 1955

Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off leaves from a poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below (Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the Ramsdale Journal with a very precise thud on to the porch. I began creeping up to her – ‘crippling’ up to her, as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces between which—rather than upon which—I slowly progressed by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider. I must have taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a telescope, and toward her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, on soft distorted limbs, in terrible concentration. At last I was right behind her when I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle—shaking her by the scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my real manège, and she said in a shrill brief whine: ‘Cut it out!’ – most coarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert the Humble beat a gloomy retreat while she went on wisecracking streetward.

Dialect: Australian English
Author: Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker)
Source: Carpet Snake (Michael Wilding, ed., The Oxford Book of Australian Short Stories, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994)

He was a beauty, that ten-foot carpet snake we had as a pet. My father belonged to the Noo-muccle tribe of Stradbroke Island, and the carpet snake was his totem. He made sure he looked after his blood-brother. My mother belonged to a different tribe. The carpet snake was not her totem. She hated old Carpie, because of his thieving ways. She was proud of her fowl-run and of the eggs our hens provided. Carpie liked the fowl-run too; every time he felt hungry he would sneak in, select the choicest fowl in the run, and swallowed it. He would always outsmart Mother, no matter what she did to keep her chooks out of his ravenous belly. But, somehow, Mother was never game enough to bring down the axe on Carpie’s head. We all knew she was often tempted to do just that. I think two things stopped her: her deep respect for the fact that Dads decisions were final around the house, and the thought that if she killed in anger, Biami the Good Spirit would punish her. 

beauty = fine specimen
chooks = chickens
game = courageous

Dialect: American Black English
Author: Alice Walker
Source: The Color Purple, 1983

Dear God,
Us dress Squeak like she a white woman, only her clothes patch. She got on a starch and iron dress, high heel shoes with scuffs, and a old hat somebody give Shug. Us give her a old pocketbook look like a quilt and a little black bible. Us wash her hair and git all the grease out, then I put it up in two plaits that cross over her head. Us bathe her so clean she smell like a good clean floor.
What I’m gon say? she ast.
Say you living with Sofia husband and her husband say Sofia not being punish enough. Say she laugh at the fool she make of the guards. Say she gitting along just fine where she at. Happy even, long as she don’t have to be no white woman maid.
Gracious God, say Squeak, how I’m gonna tune up my mouth to say all that?
He ast you who you is, make him remember. Tell him how much that quarter he give you meant to you.

Dialect: Formal 20th Century English (Japanese expatriate)
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Source: The Remains of the Day, 1989

News of the death had arrived some hours earlier; indeed, I had myself knocked on the door of her parlour that morning to hand her the letter. I had stepped inside for a brief moment to discuss some professional matter, and I recall we were seated at her table and in mid-conversation at the moment she opened the letter. She became very still, but to her credit she remained composed, reading the letter through at least twice. Then she put the letter carefully back in its envelope and looked across the table to me.
‘It is from Mrs Johnson, a companion of my aunt. She says my aunt died the day before yesterday.’ She paused a moment, then said: ‘The funeral is to take place tomorrow. I wonder if it might be possible for me to take the day off.’
‘I am sure that could be arranged, Miss Kenton.’
‘Thank you, Mr Stevens. Forgive me, but perhaps I may now have a few moments alone.’
‘Of course, Miss Kenton.’
I made my exit, and it was not until after I had done so that it occurred to me I had not actually offered her my condolences. I could well imagine the blow the news would be to her, her aunt having been, to all intents and purposes, like a mother to her, and I paused out in the corridor, wondering if I should go back, knock, and make good my omission. But then it occurred to me that if I were to do so, I might easily intrude upon her private grief. Indeed, it was not impossible that Miss Kenton, at that very moment, and only a few feet from me, was actually crying. The thought provoked a strange feeling to rise within me, causing me to stand there hovering in the corridor for some moments. But eventually I judged it best to await another opportunity to express my sympathy and went on my way.

Dialect: Colloquial Modern English (USA)
Author: Carrie Fisher
Source: Postcards from the Edge, 1987

‘No, we don’t need to talk about what happened yesterday! I’ve talked about as much as I’m gonna talk in this place. Yeah, I know my parents are coming in. Oh, you would? You’d like the four of us to sit down? You’d like that? Good, the three of you sit down and talk, ‘cause I’ve fuckin’ had it. I’ve had it! I’ve sat in rooms with my parents and I’ve sat in rooms with you, and I didn’t like either one and I don’t think I’d like both. I’m fucking out of here! I’m gone, so you can kiss my ass good-bye. I don’t need this clinic, and I certainly don’t need some asshole ex-junkie like you.
‘Oh, really? I don’t get it? I get it, mister. From the day I came in here I got it. I got that you were an asshole and this place sucks. I don’t need this place to not do drugs. No, I don’t. What happened to me was purely accidental, and you can tell me from here to tomorrow all this shit about me being an addict - you, with your shooting up. Carl told me you even murdered somebody once to get drugs, and you’re gonna tell me? I grew up in this nice part of town and you, Mister Murderer Junkie, are gonna tell me how to stop doing drugs? I have nothing in common with you. Sayonara, you asshole, I’m outta here.’
Ha! I told that fuckin’ asshole, that murdering junkie son-of-a-bitch. I told him, I fuckin’ told him. Christ, I’m so sick of the sterilized smell of this place.
‘Hold the elevator!’

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