Quotes & Sayings About Multilingualism

Certainty' with respect to successful language learning and use--whether oral, written, or technologically mediated combinations--applies less and less to discrete products and more to adaptive processes. — Jay Jordan

I think flexibility, humility, and multilingualism should take the place of sticklerism, arrogance, and nationalism when we think about language. I — Robert Lane Greene

One of the first things to understand was how people knew what language to speak to whom. Where I've lived in the American Southwest, choosing to speak English or Spanish based on how someone looks is risky. If you try English and they don't speak it, you can switch to Spanish if you know it. But if you start with Spanish, you might offend: 'You don't think I speak English?' This can be the case if you're Anglo, even if you speak Spanish very well and just heard the other person speaking Spanish. When I described such an scenario to Indians, they couldn't relate - to them, choosing the wrong language wasn't embarrassing or politically charged. Or so they said. — Michael Erard

I myself am a supporter of multilingualism, but multilingualism without a true understanding of universal language will only make us blind and ultimately ineffectual in realizing that very ideal. — Minae Mizumura

Orm always afterwards used to say that, after good luck, strength, and skill at arms, nothing was so useful to a man who found himself among foreigners as the ability to learn a language. — Frans G. Bengtsson

What you see and hear is a situation in which languages are less like apples - neat and discrete - and more like oatmeal. It's always been oatmeal in India, and all the varieties of oatmeal continue to merge, despite political pressures to name them as if they were marbles. — Michael Erard

According to the 'Language Institute Regina Coeli' 'Learning a language allows parts of your brain to grow' By using MRI technology, scientists have collected evidence to prove that parts of the brain actually grow when a person studies a language intensively over a longer period of time. 'Multilingualism keeps Alzheimer's at bay — Hanife Hassan O'Keeffe

If one could read fluently, confidently, in every known language, one would have no need of translators or translations; one could read Homer on Mondays, Akhmatova on Tuesdays, Swahili poets on Wednesdays, and so on. — Abraham Verghese