I think we should get more behind te reo. Being able to see a friend and have a conversation, it would be great if we could get to that stage.
English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.
My publication, 'The Post,' has taken the initiative to translate many of my pieces and publish them in Arabic. For that, I am grateful. Arabs need to read in their own language so they can understand and discuss the various aspects and complications of democracy in the United States and the West.
Speaking and writing English perfectly should not be a privilege. To those who try to politicize this matter, I tell them now, do not mess with the future of our children.
Maybe my job on this planet is to make the Asian accent sexy.
I want to be open to the kids who only speak Spanish, the kids who speak only Spanglish, and the kids who don't even speak Spanish at all.
It would be good if teachers could genuinely understand that black English is not mistakes, it's just different English, and that what you want to do is add an additional dialect to black students' repertoire rather than teaching them out of what's thought of as a bad habit, like sloppy posture or chewing with your mouth open.
I want to invite the mainstream into my world and to my sound and to what I'm doing. And I want mainstream artists to respect me and accept Latino artists as equals without us having to sing in English. I want them to know that I can compete globally, with whomever, in Spanish.
Unless you speak English and read well, you'll never be a first-class citizen ... but when you say "official," that becomes a racial slur.
We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us.
I felt very motivated to release some things in English because I wanna represent my community.
Ability to speak the majority language is not just important for inclusion; it is important for minorities to be able to claim their rights and entitlements.
Language should not be a barrier for an actor; I want the world to see my work and not limit it to Hindi-speaking audiences.
An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.
I'm actually all for political correctness. If you want to work to change the usage of a word that's discriminatory then fine, I'm behind you. But that's a conversation that needs to be had in the culture. You can't just decide that commonly used parts of a language are evil and that the people who didn't get the memo must be bad people.
Most Arab Israelis speak Hebrew, but not the other way around. It's about time that changed.
I want mainstream artists to accept Latino artists as equals without us having to sing in English.
The more people that learn sign language, the better. This is part of my life, but it's not part of everybody's life, so it's nice to expose this to the world.
Speaking two languages fluently makes each language not so important.
I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.
When we started on 'Power,' I was committed to respecting the differences among Spanish dialects: Dominican, Nuyorican, Mexican, etc. I wanted the language our characters spoke to be as specific as possible, to reflect New York as it is.
We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.
The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.
