Quotes & Sayings About Speaking Other Languages

I try to write each piece in the language of the piece, so that I'm not using the same language from piece to piece. I may be using ten or twenty languages. That multiplicity of language and the use of words is African in tradition. And black writers have definitely taken that up and taken it in. It's like speaking in tongues. It may sound like gibberish to somebody, but you know it's a tongue of some kind. Black people have this. We have the ability as a race to speak in tongues, to dream in tongues, to love in tongues. — Alexis De Veaux

Languages are the bearers of the cultural genes. As we learn a language, accents, and ways of speaking, we also learn ways of thinking, feeling, and relating. — Ken Robinson

Languages are fluffy big pillows stuffed between nations - what others say is muffled and nearly lost in them, and when we speak their grammar we get feathers in our mouth. It's worth it. What pleasure to phrase an idea, even in child's words, slowly, and sail it across the gulf in another language to a different-speaking human being! — Richard Bach

Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens. The citizens can go on speaking one language or six languages, or no languages if they so choose. Bilingualism is an imposition on the state and not the citizens. — Pierre Trudeau

English you're speaking," Matheus said. "The language that sidles up to other languages in dark alleys, mugs them, then rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary. It's the bitch-whore of languages and it owns the world. Suck on that, Rome boy. — Amy Fecteau

Maybe I not need feeling lonely, because I can talk to other "me." Is like seeing my two pieces of lips speaking in two languages at same time. Yes, I not lonely, because I with another me. Like Austin Powers with his Mini Me — Xiaolu Guo

Here is perhaps the most delicious turn that comes out of thinking about politics from the standpoint of place: anyone of any race, language, religion, or origin is welcome, as long as they live well on the land. The great Central Valley region does not prefer English over Spanish or Japanese or Hmong. If it had any preferences at all, it might best like the languages it has heard for thousands of years, such as Maidu or Miwok, simply because it is used to them. Mythically speaking, it will welcome whomever chooses to observe the etiquette, express the gratitude, grasp the tools, and learn the songs that it takes to live there. — Gary Snyder

The silence in the giant redwood forest near my house draws me...At eight in the morning, the great trees stand rooted in a silence so absolute that one's inmost self comes to rest. An aged silence. Some mornings I sleep through two alarms and awaken only after the first buses have arrived. I go anyway. There are hundreds of people in the woods before me. People speaking French, German, Spanish; people marveling to each other and calling to their children in Japanese, Swedish, Russian, and some languages I do not know. And children shrieking in the universal language of childhood. But the silence is always there, unchanged. It is as impervious to these passing sounds as the trees themselves. — Rachel Naomi Remen

People come from around the world and can understand each other without even speaking the same languages! — Sergei Bubka

Rome was mud and smoky skies; the rank smell of the Tiber and the exotically spiced cooking fires of a hundred different nationalities. Rome was white marble and gilding and heady perfumes; the blare of trumpets and the shrieking of market-women and the eternal, sub-aural hum of more people, speaking more languages than Gaius had ever imagined existed, crammed together on seven hills whose contours had long ago disappeared beneath this encrustation if humanity. Rome was the pulsing heart of the world. — Marion Zimmer Bradley

One of the reasons I came to Berkeley was because I saw so many students of all different colors speaking so many different languages and ferociously presenting all these different views. I thought, this is the 21st century and I want to be here! — June Jordan

An important United Nations environmental conference went past 6:00 in the evening when the interpreters' contracted working conditions said they could leave. They left, abandoning the delegates unable to talk to each other in their native languages. The French head of the committee, who had insisted on speaking only in French throughout the week suddenly demonstrated the ability to speak excellent English with English-speaking delegates. — Daniel Yergin

The child is born speaking the languages of birds; the child has horns and scales and wings; it has a beak; it has a cloven hoof. He is the sum of all creatures: the ones that swim, the ones that soar, the ones that leap, the ones that maze the earth with burrows. — Rikki Ducornet

Music is all about transporting people; speaking a language which languages fail to express. — A.R. Rahman

Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English. — Ernest Istook

And not only that but ... when the station is completed, there will be an international crew made of astronauts coming from different cultural experiences, speaking different languages, but working together for a common goal. — Umberto Guidoni

I think it's good for anybody to learn languages. Americans are particularly limited in that way. Europeans less so ... We're beginning to have Spanish move in on English in the states because of all the people coming from Hispanic countries ... and we're beginning to learn some Spanish. And I think that's a good thing ... Only having one language is very limiting ... You get to think that's the way the human race is made; there's only one language worth speaking ... Well, this isn't good for English. — W.S. Merwin

It goes without saying that these effects do not suffice to annul the necessity for a "change of terrain." It also goes without saying that the choice between these two forms of deconstruction cannot be simple and unique. A new writing must weave and interlace these two motifs of deconstruction. Which amounts to saying that one must speak several languages and produce several texts at once. I would like to point out especially that the style of the first deconstruction is mostly that of the Heideggerian questions, and the other is mostly the one which dominates France today. I am purposely speaking in terms of a dominant style: because there are also breaks and changes of terrain in texts of the Heideggerian type; because the "change of terrain" is far from upsetting the entire French landscape to which I am referring; because what we need, perhaps, as Nietzsche said, is a change of "style"; and if there is style, Nietzsche reminded us, it must be plural. — Jacques Derrida

God speaks all languages - including yours. What language is God speaking to you? — Max Lucado

I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do. — Sebastian Arcelus

A crowd of tourists were standing in the laundry room. They were speaking languages. — Stuart Dybek

A foolish German had said that man thought in words. It was totally false; a pernicious doctrine; the thoughts flashed into being in a hundred simultaneous forms, with a thousand associations, and the speaking mind selected one, forming it grossly into the inadequate symbols of words, inadequate because common to disparate situations - admitted to be inadequate for vast regions of expression, since for them there were the parallel languages of music and painting. Words were not called for in many or indeed most forms of thought: Mozart certainly thought in terms of music. He himself at this moment was thinking in terms of scent. — Patrick O'Brian

Why are there more male hyperpolyglots? One answer is that speaking a lot of languages is a geek macho thing (...) It seemed that a woman is less likely to say she "speaks" or "knows" a language if she studied it at some point in the past, while a man, wanting to display his giant repertoire, would include it. — Michael Erard

Books are mute as far as sound is concerned. It follows that reading aloud is a combination of two distinct operations, of two 'languages.' It is something far more complex than speaking and reading taken separately by themselves. — Maria Montessori

When he is dissected after his death," a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, "a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them. — Kato Lomb

If there is a country in the world where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected, it is America. Made up as it is of people from different nations, accustomed to different forms and habits of government, speaking different languages, and more different in their modes of worship, it would appear that the union of such a people was impracticable; but by the simple operation of constructing government on the principles of society and the rights of man, every difficulty retires, and all the parts are brought into cordial unison. There the poor are not oppressed, the rich are not privileged. Industry is not mortified by the splendid extravagance of a court rioting at its expense. Their taxes are few, because their government is just: and as there is nothing to render them wretched, there is nothing to engender riots and tumults. — Thomas Paine

Speaking Mandarin with a Russian accent is extremely difficult. Of all the languages I have learned, Mandarin took me the longest, and having to replicate the suitable tones while simultaneously presenting myself as a rather bumbling Soviet scholar was an exercise that caused me considerable distress. In — Claire North

I can speak the languages of lots of groups and learn others with some ease, but no matter how fluent I am, when I'm not speaking Josie, I am merely acting. We all are when we interact outside of our natural cultures. It is inevitable, because it is impossible to be fully yourself in a foreign language. — Erin McCahan

In an astonishingly short time I reached the point where the language taught itself - where I learned to speak merely by speaking. This point is the place which students taught foreign languages in our schools and colleges find great difficulty in reaching. I think the main trouble is that they learn too much of a language at a time. A French child with a vocabulary of two hundred words can express more spoken ideas than a student of French can with a knowledge of two thousand. — James Weldon Johnson

Love can be expressed and received in all five languages. However, if you don't speak a person's primary love language, that person will not feel loved, even though you may be speaking the other four. Once you are speaking his or her primary love language fluently, then you can sprinkle in the other four and they will be like icing on the cake. — Gary Chapman

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them. — Ishmael Beah

No matter what town you are in, there is some social order and a different yardstick to chart. In New York, people create things like schools and speaking languages and second homes. — Jill Kargman

People in places many of us never heard of, whose names we can't pronounce or even spell, are speaking up for themselves. They speak in languages we once classified as exotic but whose mastery is now essential for our diplomats and businessmen. But what they say is very much the same the world over. They want a decent standard of living. They want human dignity and a voice in their own futures. They want their children to grow up strong and healthy and free. — Hubert H. Humphrey

Even if people are suspicious of the motives I think that learning and speaking two languages can only be a good thing for people. — Stephen Harper

Eddie Izzard is doing his show in French ... Will he be able to fake ad-lib as well in other languages? He's been speaking French for a while now, but he's talking about doing his act in German. Haven't the German people suffered enough? — Andy Kindler

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages. — Peter Hoeg

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language. — Jared Diamond

Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples. — Rita Mae Brown

C19: People make fun of our speaking a minority language. How should I react? It is often people who can't speak a second language who tend to poke fun at those who can speak two or three languages. — Colin Baker

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. As there are fewer and fewer songbirds in the air, due to the destruction of their forests and wetlands, human speech loses more and more of its evocative power. For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land's wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.17 — David Abram

Love and hate had their own secret languages, and Mark and Kieran were speaking in them now. — Cassandra Clare

The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke. — John McWhorter

I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important. — Jon Secada

I feel growing up in Mumbai is an advantage, as we grow up speaking so many languages that when we go abroad, it becomes easier to learn new languages. — Zubin Mehta

When I was quite young I fondly imagined that all foreign languages were codes for English. I thought that "hat," say, was the real and actual name of the thing, but that people in other countries, who obstinately persisted in speaking the code of their forefathers, might use the word "ibu," say, to designate not merely the concept hat, but the English word "hat." I knew only one foreign word, "oui," and since it had three letters as did the word for which it was a code, it seemed, touchingly enough, to confirm my theory. — Annie Dillard

He was also the god of (take a deep breath) commerce, languages, thievery, cheeseburgers, trickery, eloquent speaking, feasts, cheeseburgers, hospitality, guard dogs, birds of omen, gymnastics, athletic competitions, cheeseburgers, cheeseburgers and telling fortunes with dice. Okay, I just tossed in the cheeseburgers to see if you were paying attention. Also, I'm hungry. — Rick Riordan

Kerry was here in Los Angeles. He was courting the Spanish vote by speaking Spanish. And he showed people he could be boring in two languages. — Jay Leno

So for all that we might speak words in each other's vicinity, this could never develop into anything that could be called a conversation. It was as though we were speaking in different languages. If the Dalai Lama were on his deathbed and the jazz musician Eric Dolphy were to try to explain to him the importance of choosing one's engine oil in accordance with changes in the sound of the bass clarinet, that exchange might have been more worthwhile and effective than my conversations with Noboru Wataya. — Haruki Murakami

There were two gentleman seated by it talking in French;impossible to follow their rapid utterance, or comprehend much of the purport of what they said ... yet French, in the mouths of Frenchmen or Belgians ( ... ), was as music to my ears. One of these gentlemen presently discerned me to be an Englishman - no doubt from the fashion in which I addressed the waiter; for I would persist in speaking French in my execrable South-of-England style, though the man understood English. The gentleman, after looking towards me once or twice ,politely accosted me in very good English; I remember I wish to God that I could speak French as well; his fluency and correct pronunciation impressed me for the first time with a due notion of the cosmopolitan character of the capital I was in, it was my first experience of that skill in living languages I afterwards found to be so general in Brussels. — Charlotte Bronte

Often, architects work too hard trying to make their buildings look different. It's like we're actors let loose on a stage, all speaking our parts at the same time in our own private languages without an audience. — David Chipperfield

A special skill, like speaking several languages, or keeping your mouth shut in one. — Evan Esar