2,489 Quotes About Language

See, I understand what no one else seems to grasp. Communication is manipulation. Every time we speak we are trying to achieve an effect—a goal. We first learn to talk so we may better manipulate our parents. Sign language. Grunting and pointing. Wearing certain clothes and baubles. Walking or standing a certain way. This is all language and it is all manipulation.

I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedle-dum, “But it ain’t so, nohow.” “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.

There is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.

It's a common mistake for vacationing Americans to assume that everyone around them is French and therefore speaks no English whatsoever. [...] An experienced traveler could have told by looking at my shoes that I wasn't French. And even if I were French, it's not as if English is some mysterious tribal dialect spoken only by anthropologists and a small population of cannibals.

Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam. A country without a language is a country without a soul.

exaggeration is the octopus of the English language

The French believe that all errors are distant, someone else's fault. Americans believe that there is no distance, no difference, and therefore that there are no errors, that any troubles are simple misunderstandings, consequent on your not yet having spoken English loudly enough.

Furniture or gold can be taken away from you, but knowledge and a new language can easily be taken from one place to the other, and nobody can take them away from you.