44 Quotes About Languages-and-culture

At hearing the news, he unsuccessfully tried to stop himself from being happy. He wondered how it happened that his average grades and middling job experience were somehow deemed weightier than genuine life skills--Renato's naked ambition, Angela's people skills, Vincent's quick thinking, Imaculada's grit--only because he articulated them better, just because he had the English nouns and verbs, the necessary tongue and lip placements, to say, 'I have made these myself. Listen.

Language by its very nature is naive,we make it complex and naughty. We make it look and sound like what it is not.

The totality of utterances that can be made in a speech community is the language of that speech community.

The way people want to get respect for their culture and language, it is critical to reciprocate the same to other else you don't have any right to condemn others.

Learning English was like lifting a veil, one which would be, he'd learn, impossible to fully restore.

If words were nuts and bolts, people could make any bolt fit into any nut: they'd just squish the one into the other, as in some surrealistic painting where everything goes soft. Language, in human hands, becomes almost like a fluid, despite the coarse grain of its components.

Adiós. A Dios. To God. From God. De Dios. Dedos. My fingers waving. Good-bye.

The woman smiles and says, "Hey," the standard Norwegian greeting.I "Hey" back, but then she says a whole sentence and I am force to explain, in English, that I have no idea what she is saying. I feel like a fraud, and I see a change in the focus of her eyes. I am a stranger, and even if I am no less welcome, I am still a stranger.