Linguistic Diversity Quotes

One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland - and no other.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from.

The people I know who swear the most tend to have the widest vocabularies.

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.

I don't hate language. I have my own language, but I also enjoy the English language. Obviously, you don't read a lot of literature and not care about language.

Words in a person's word stock are like paints on a palette. It helps to have just the right shade when you need it.

We were doing the same thing. 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. Nuevo-mexicanos have done it very well for hundreds of years, inventing words where they don't have them. I think the future of our language is where we claim our bilingualism for its utility.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

A language is not just words. It's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is. It's all embodied in a language.

Languages are the keys of science.

Laistry....I can't even say that. What would you call them in English?" "Canadians.

Language tethers us to the world; without it we spin like atoms.

Translations are very important these days, since an average person can only know 2-3 three languages. We have so many languages in India and poems are being written in as many of them.

Translation is the circulatory system of the world's literatures

The more elevated a culture, the richer its language. The number of words and their combinations depends directly on a sum of conceptions and ideas; without the latter there can be no understandings, no definitions, and, as a result, no reason to enrich a language.

A different language is a different vision of life.

Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.

Well, I like how people talk. I like language. You know, Linda Richman spoke in Yiddish.

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America.

Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

In the coming decades, questions of identity, meaning cultural heritage, language, and religion will play a central role in politics.

I am now completing research supported by NSF and NEH that is mapping changes in the English language through all of North America, for both mainstream and minority communities.