2,489 Quotes About Language

We're on the border of this world, speaking a common language. That's all.

One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status.

In speech he stretched out his vowel sounds to give his mouth a rest before the next consonant.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes("News From The World")

All our tongues and cultures are constant shoplifters" from other tongues and cultures.

One day, walking neer one of your Yuman houses, smelling all the interest with snout, I herd, from inside, the most amazing sound. Turns out, what that sound is, was: the Yuman voice, making werds. They sounded grate! They sounded like prety music! I listened to those music werds until the sun went down...

He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

Strictly speaking, nothing that’s said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can’t ever say it.)

Words are the wellspring of the world, and language is the most powerful weapon in the ancient and still unfolding war between truth and lies.