Language Culture Quotes

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.

I've said it a million times: Romance languages lead to premarital sex.

Every year, I send 1,000 students to China to study Chinese history, language, and culture.

Americans and French are notoriously monolingual, especially earlier generations. Language is a sense of pride in both cultures. I think that the French and Americans are like brothers or sisters who are so similar that they irritate one another.

The more English is heard in the world, the more gratifying it seems to speak French, and above all to know the culture of our country. They find a kind of French social grace in the language and culture.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture.

In South Africa, we speak English and sometimes Afrikaans, sometimes Zulu, sometimes Xhosa.

I write in words. And my words are Hebrew words.

I think once you understand a language, you understand the culture surrounding it as well.

Children learn to speak Male or Female the way they learn to speak English or French.

There is a slam-dunk case for extending foreign language teaching to children aged five. Just as some people have taken a perverse pride in not understanding mathematics, so we have taken a perverse pride in the fact that we do not speak foreign languages, and we just need to speak louder in English.

Like 'Lost in Translation,' I worked on an advertisement where a Hollywood star was doing a commercial just for Japan. The star was Hugh Jackman. Since I'm Australian, they just assumed I knew him, and I didn't correct them.

My thoughts, my feelings, my spirit, they are all in Spanish.

Half of us are partly German! Half our language and culture, generally, in Anglo-Saxon terms, is German.

I have an English identity and a French identity. When I'm in France, I'm more outgoing. And the French part of me cooks, whereas the English part of me writes.

I think the best part of learning a language is that you can see the country's culture through the language. And it gives you different levels of understanding of that culture when you really try to dig in and learn it.

A language is something infinitely greater than grammar and philology. It is the poetic testament of the genius of a race and a culture, and the living embodiment of the thoughts and fancies that have moulded them