Quotes About Language

It is important that we realize that words have meanings far beyond the dictionary definition.

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

One day, I was just thinking about something, and then - you know when you think, and you have that inner voice in your head? I realized it was in English.

One of the things that makes Wittgenstein a real artist to me is that he realized that no conclusion could be more horrible than solipsism.

People just think Africa is this one thing. So if you're from Nigeria, then you're the same as somebody from Kenya; not realizing that within Nigeria, right, we have 250 different ethnic groups, right? Two hundred and fifty different languages.

Words have power, and especially in the realm of beauty, how we speak about ourselves is important.

People ask me why my figures have to be so black. There are a lot of reasons. First, the blackness is a rhetorical device. When we talk about ourselves as a people and as a culture, we talk about black history, black culture, black music. That's the rhetorical position we occupy.

My son Beau got very ill when he was just four months old in Majorca. He contracted a really bad case of gastroenteritis. Everything feels so much worse when you don't speak the language, and you need that reassuring conversation as a mum, but you can't have it.

Dictionaries are always fun, but not always reassuring.

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.

At acting school people didn't speak like me. It was all received pronunciation - 'ow now brown cow.'

When I used to listen to the poets in other languages and the kind of appreciation they received, I wanted to be there on the dais and experience that myself.

By four years of age, the average child in a family receiving public assistance has heard about 13 million words, compared to 45 million for a child from a wealthier family. The disadvantages developed during their first four years are usually still present in high school.

For one thing, before the 20th century, there were plenty of genocides. We tend to forget about them, partly because they weren't as well documented and partly because, until recently, people didn't care. We used euphemisms like 'sackings' and 'sieges' instead of calling them 'genocides.'

As a child, I learned hundreds of poems by heart, which I can recite to this day.

Shakespeare is absolutely big in Africa. I guess he's big everywhere. Growing up, Shakespeare was the thing. You'd learn monologues and you'd recite them. And just like hip-hop, it made you feel like you knew how to speak English really well. You had a mastery of the English language to some extent.

I would write down the lyrics to 'C.R.E.A.M.' in Korean - not translating it, but phonetically writing out each word. I didn't know what they were saying, so I would just write everything down as I heard it. I would recite it and imitate it like that. That's how I started to write my own raps.

I can recite poetry, but I cannot write it.

Bizarrely, our English word 'sturdy' may go back to the Latin turdus, thrush. Anyone described as 'sturdy' in the 1200s was wilfully reckless and possibly as immovable as a sozzled bird.

With Lille, we could have gone to the South of France, and people wouldn't have recognised us. But at Chelsea, the players are at another level. Everything has changed - the language, the country - but it is up to me to adapt.

This character's entirely invented, and the woman that I interviewed wouldn't recognize herself, or really anything about herself, in this book, which she hasn't read, because she doesn't read English.

Ordinary language carries with it conditions of meaning which it is easy to recognize by classifying the contexts in which the expression is employed in a meaningful manner.

Today, with a recording, he can hear the thing enough times until he really gets acquainted with the language, and then he can begin to make an estimate of the intrinsic, aesthetic value of that piece of music.

I think records and music are more appropriate and more respectful of the human soul than the churches are. And more respectful of the needs of humans to communicate with the aspects of themselves that are neglected by language.