Quotes About Language

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It's become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

I loved 'Saturday Night Fever' when I was a kid. I couldn't believe people talked that way. It was just a whole new culture I didn't understand. I snuck into it. It was an R-rated film. So it holds a special place.

Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.

I am proud to be the granddaughter and daughter of immigrants who were brave enough to leave their homes and come to a whole new world with a different language and culture and immerse themselves fearlessly to start a better life for themselves and their families.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect.

Now why should the cinema follow the forms of theater and painting rather than the methodology of language, which allows wholly new concepts of ideas to arise from the combination of two concrete denotations of two concrete objects?

The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent, destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion. Black and white, boy and girl operate in this language together. This language, which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has intruded in England.

The next time you watch a villain or an actor whom you know to be a non-native speaker of the language, watch the lip-sync. You'll know the amount of work that dubbing artistes have been putting in to elevate the performance of the actors.

The best translations cannot convey to us the strength and exquisite delicacy of thought in its native garb, and he to whom such books are shut flounders about in outer darkness.

Of course, the majority of us would speak up in the face of outrageous bigotry, but do we speak up in a social situation when someone casually refers to something as 'gay'? If we don't, we are standing with the homophobes whom we are quietly fighting.

A spirit, breathing the language of independence, is natural to Englishmen, few of whom are disposed to brook compulsion, or submit to the dictates of others, when not softened by reason, or tempered with kindness.

No one gets angry at a mathematician or a physicist whom he or she doesn't understand, or at someone who speaks a foreign language, but rather at someone who tampers with your own language.

The very use of the word savage, as it is applied in its general sense, I am inclined to believe is an abuse of the word, and the people to whom it is applied.

Crabbed and obscure definitions are of no use beyond a narrow circle of students, of whom probably every one has a pet one of his own.

My accent depends on whom I'm around.

Somebody said to me that I speak English almost like somebody for whom English is not their first language.

I can't recall any difficulty in making the C language definition completely open - any discussion on the matter tended to mention languages whose inventors tried to keep tight control, and consequent ill fate.

Mom developed an interest in 'heritage-language education after noticing an increasing number of students in her UCLA classes whose parents were Russian.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould.

The human face is the organic seat of beauty. It is the register of value in development, a record of Experience, whose legitimate office is to perfect the life, a legible language to those who will study it, of the majestic mistress, the soul.

When I was living in China, I learned to make things hyper-explicit because often they were being read by people whose command of English kept them from picking up what I thought were obvious signals.

Why, der language down dar in de far South is jus' as different from ours in Maryland, as you can think. Dey laughed when dey heard me talk, an' I could not understand 'dem, no how.

My language is a feel-thinking language, feeling and thinking at once, that is why it is a celebration of life, and at once it is a denunciation of everything that is not allowed in life to be real life, it's plenitude.