2,489 Quotes About Language

If there's any interaction between genes and languages, it is often languages that influence genes, since linguistic differences between populations lessen the chance of genetic exchange between them.

The theory that languages are tools used for particular purposes, sometimes for many different purposes, means that extinct languages belong neither in a museum of art nor in a museum of natural history. Tools are meant to be surpassed by better tools. Once they are, they should be preserved in a museum of technology, of human ingenuity, of the cultural past.

Words are world-makers—and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.

The study of how injuries in different areas of the brain result in different verbal behaviour patterns has been fundamental to relating cognitive functional models of language, informed by linguistics and cognitive psychology, with neural correlates.

The attitude of English speakers to foreign languages can be summed up thus: let’s plunder, not learn them.

• Should we reclaim an Indigenous language in a natural Indigenous setting, to replicate the original ambience of heritage, culture, laws, and lores?• Should we reclaim an Indigenous language in a modern building that has Indigenous characteristics such as Aboriginal colours and shapes?• Should we reclaim an Aboriginal language in a western governmentalbuilding—to give an empowering signal that the tribe has full support of contemporary mainstream society?

In this sort of predicament, always ask yourself: How did we learn the meaning of this word ("good", for instance)? From what sort of examples? In what language-games? Then it will be easier for you to see that the word must have a family of meanings.

Man has an instinctive tendency to speak, as we see in the babble of our young children, but no child has an instinctive tendency to bake, brew, or write.

The difficulty with language lies not only in the accumulation of meanings that a particular word bears throughout its trajectory of usefulness, but likewise in the dominance of one meaning with the resulting eclipse of the others.