Language Appropriation Quotes

I jumped off a bridge in Italy, is that culturally insensitive? Is saying 'mamma mia' culturally insensitive?

You're not from Puerto Rico, so you should say Puerto Rico like all the other people from the place that you come from.

Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.

I hate it when people in India throw in an American or English accent while rapping without even a passport in possession.

Every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society, for there is no law, whether natural or not, which forbids talking about things

Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people's anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.

I hate all that nonsense about not touching the colonialists' language. All that about it being corrupting and belonging to the master and making you Caliban. That thinking just denies you an outlet. You deny everything that is great from a language, whether it is Conrad or Shakespeare.

Somebody, just because they are black, too, or just because they are trans, too, or just because they're gay and recognize I'm trans, does that mean you have the familiarity to use certain language? And I don't mean with just me but with the community.

Of course the other and more serious way in which it all happens is that one finds in poems and language some quality one appropriates for oneself and wishes to reproduce.

I always thought those World War II films with German people speaking English with German accents was weird.

I wanted my own words. But the ones I use have dragged through I don't know how many consciences.

I felt like hip-hop was my music, it was like my outsider music... but then my mom started answering our phone, 'Yo, what's up.' She was hearing me talk to my friends. I was like, 'No, mom, don't cop the hip-hop talk.'