Quotes About Bilingualism

The full meaning of a language is never translatable into another. We may speak several languages but one of them always remains the one in which we live. In order completely to assimilate a language it would be necessary to make the world which it expresses one's own and one never does belong to two worlds at once.

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

I could speak Spanish fluently growing up, but I'm so out of practice, and I have such a tremendous respect for songwriting in the Spanish language.

le bilinguisme est une stimulation intellectuelle de tous les instants.

Amina knew she was a different person in Bangla than she was English; she noticed the change every time she switched languages on the phone. She was older in English, and also less fastidious; she was the parent to her parents.

What enables a child not only to learn words, but to put them together in meaningful sentences? What pushes children to go on developing complex grammatical language even though their early simple communication is successful for most purposes? Does child language develop similarly around the world? How do bilingual children acquire more than one language?

by the time they are a year old, babies who will become speakers of Arabic stop reacting to the difference between 'pa' and 'ba' which is not phonemic in Arabic. Babies who regularly hear more than one language in their environment continue to respond to these differences for a longer period (Werker, Weikum, and Yoshida 2006).

How does the brain wire words? Why do the Swiss manage three languages, while most Americans have trouble with one?

I've had the privilege of learning foreign languages. Instead of merely speaking a watered-down form of my mother tongue, like most people, I'm also helpless in two or three other languages.