Douglas Hyde Quotes

It is time for dead languages to be quiet.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

There's a tremendous amount of language loss. Most of the attention is given to indigenous languages, which makes sense, but some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe.

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.

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.

Languages and cultures are disappearing at an enormously fast rate, and many of them are in Canada. These are extreme examples of removal of freedom of expression - to actually lose a language and the ability to express that culture.

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

I want to keep talking about my people and my country in my own language.

The French no longer respect their language, because they no longer love themselves, and, no longer loving themselves, they no longer love what was the instrument of their glory - their language.

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

People forget that there are villages and communities that are still speaking French all over Canada. I went to a bar and spoke with some French people there, and they were saying: 'I went to English school, but at home it was always French, and that's going to be the way it is for my kids.' It's important for them to keep that language alive.

The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.

I always speak Welsh to my family.

I used to speak Algerian, but I'd lost nearly everything.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigrees of nations.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.