It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.
When California passes a law saying that English is the official language, it can only mean one thing: That English is no longer the official language.
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.
Speaking Spanish isn't a benefit in Hollywood.
In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.
I think that in the past there has been a kind of cultural resistance to Latin because it's associated with elitism.
Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.
When I started in the profession, there were very visible actors who were Scottish, Welsh, or regional. Lots of working-class-hero leading actors; it was not fashionable to sound posh. Now, I'm middle-aged; it's fashionable to sound posh if you are the generation behind me.
It's just nice to be able to communicate and be able to identify with a lot of different cultures. I have no idea what it would be like to be just one thing and speak one language. I feel enormously privileged to travel and be able to mingle and speak to people that, had I only known English, I wouldn't have been able to meet.
I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn't English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German or Japanese.
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
I don't think the elite class is only speaking the good English.
To this day, good English usually means the English wealthy and powerful people spoke a generation or two ago.
I see the wielding of a pronoun as something that can be freeing for some members of society but a shackle to others like myself.
I think with all my books, language has been their subject as much as anything else. Language can elide or displace or sideline whole groups of people. You can't necessarily change the way language is used, but if it becomes something you're conscious of... that gives you a certain power over it.
I think Britain is a bit class-ridden. People tend to be judged by how rounded their vowels are.
If you are educated in English-medium schools, you get a better view of the world, develop more liberal values, have more gender sensitivity and become more forward looking. But you pay a price because you don't know your own language.
What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.
Just because I don't speak English with an accent anymore doesn't mean that I'm better than the people who do.
It is wrong to judge a person based on the language they know.
National languages are all huge systems of vested interests which sullenly resist critical inquiry.
The problem and privilege we all have is being alive in this century and able to read this language. It makes any list meaningless except the list of an illiterate.
Most educated Indians are bilingual. Amongst the urban elite though, there is a disdain for regional languages. That's unfortunate.
