Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

Miami is America’s most diverse city… We have 140 languages we speak..

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

I have sung in all languages, and so every people know me - Gujarati, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu.

I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

Speaking more than one language and living in a multicultural family and environment did not seem like anything but what it was: the world I lived in.

Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.

It is my great good luck the words I use are English words, which means I live in a very old nation of open borders; a rich, deep, multi-layered, promiscuous universe, infused with Latin, German, French, Greek, Arabic and countless other tongues.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

Only in North America is it regarded as a major achievement to speak one language moderately well.

It always trips me out that America, the most powerful and magnificent nation in the history of the world, whose might was built by immigrants from all over the world, only speaks one language.

In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.

My dad knows every single accent from being an old Yiddish grandpa to being Indian or Jamaican. It was very cool to grow up with that.

There were about 6,000 languages spoken on this planet at the beginning of the 20th century, there are probably only 600 still widely spoken at the beginning of the 21st century. Together with biodiversity, cultural and linguistic diversity are fading fast.

There are men of eighteen different languages; they are scattered here and there upon the [Hudson] river.

It is asked of me that I give my first speech in this house in a language [English] other than my mother tongue [French.] …. Even if I knew English as intimately as I knew French, I would still give my first speech in the language of my French Canadian compatriots

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.

I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.

I would love to be bilingual. I think having a second or third language at my bidding would open up the world in amazing ways.

India is a conglomeration of different states with various languages, tradition, and culture for each.

There are more than thousand mother tongues spoken in our country. This is not just a number but a reason to be proud of.

It's better to live a world where you can hear different languages and sensibilities.

Each language is a different lens from through which you view the world. So, learn as much as you can!

I enjoy singing in different languages, be it Telugu or Bengali. I would like to sing in Malayalam too.