183 Quotes About Linguistics

The words we choose can build communities, reunite loved ones, and inspire others. They can be a catalyst for change. However, our words also have the power to destroy and divide: they can start a war, reduce a lifelong relationship to a collection of memories, or end a life.

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

A thing named, misnamed, unnamed, or renamed is still itself.

I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds.

Every individual is at once the beneficiary and the victim of the linguistic tradition into which he has been born.

Speech has both an individual and a social side, and we cannot conceive of one without the other.

My partner and I were going to renew our vowels, but the consonants revolted.

Today's language is yesterday's perceptual experience.