2,489 Quotes About Language

When you live in a country that speaks a language you don’t know, you learn a lot. You learn not to complain: too much of a hassle.

The human impulse behind the isolation of class is as basic as impulses get: People like to be around other people who understand them and to whom they can talk.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

The language of light can only be decoded by the heart. Truth can only be seen by those with truth in them.

A mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless... speciesless.

If you can’t define something you have no formal rational way of knowing that it exists. Neither can you really tell anyone else what it is. There is, in fact, no formal difference between inability to define and stupidity.

Я считал язык практически сверхъестественной силой, которая заставляет наш мозг, заключенный в череп толщиной в сантиметр, вступать в коммуникацию с другими людьми. Слово приобретает смысл только в общении, а смысл жизни и ее качество неразрывно связаны с глубиной взаимоотношений, в которые мы вступаем. Именно человеческие отношения являются фундаментом значимости существования.

Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya nchi za Tanzania, Kenya na Uganda. Ni lugha isiyo rasmi ya nchi za Rwanda, Burundi, Msumbiji na Jamhuri ya Kidemokrasia ya Kongo. Lugha ya Kiswahili ni mali ya nchi za Afrika ya Mashariki, si mali ya nchi za Afrika Mashariki peke yake. Pia, Kiswahili ni lugha rasmi ya Umoja wa Afrika; pamoja na Kiarabu, Kiingereza, Kifaransa, Kireno na Kihispania. Kiswahili ni lugha inayozungumzwa zaidi nchini Tanzania kuliko nchi nyingine yoyote ile, duniani.

The whole of language is a continuous process of metaphor, and the history of semantics is an aspect of the history of culture; language is at the same time a living thing and a museum of fossils of life and civilisations.