Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.
If it is in speaking their word that people, by naming the world, transform it, dialogue imposes itself as the way by which they achieve significance as human beings.
From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.
Selfish-gene theory tells us nothing about the value of interacting through language.
The heart of the matter seems to me to be the direct interaction between one's making a poem in English and a poem in the language that one understands and values. I don't see how you can do it otherwise.
Every language has influences and is an influence.
Hebrew is deeply inspired by other languages.
As far as Irish writers being great, I think the fact that there have been two languages in Ireland for a very long time; there has obviously been a shared energy between those two languages.
Spanglish is the encounter: perhaps the word is marriage or divorce of English and Spanish, but also of Anglo and Hispanic civilizations - not only in the United States but in the entire continent and, perhaps, also in Spain.
I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.
I am a guest of the French language. My poems in French are born of my interaction with the French language, which is not the same as that of a French poet.
A living language is like a man suffering incessantly from small hemorrhages, and what it needs above all else is constant transactions of new blood from other tongues. The day the gates go up, that day it begins to die.
