Quotes About Language

I think somebody who speaks the language is going to notice immediately that I'm not Russian.

My wife speaks very good French. She said she would miss lots of things in the U.S., but we can't live there if Trump's president.

Movie dialogue is movie dialogue. It can sound real, but no one speaks that way.

My mother-in-law speaks not a word of English. I speak not a word of Tajiki. So I smile at her ingratiatingly and she fixes me with a beady eye.

Most of my family speaks fluent Malayalam.

In France, everyone speaks French 'cause they think it's cool. Gives 'em, gives 'em an excuse to smoke.

I think that a song, when it works, never mind a piece of long form music, even a song is something that speaks to itself but has a language all of its own, ideally.

The fact that that's the difference between Mexicans and Cubans is pronounced. It's so immediately recognizable, the way a Cuban speaks, the way a Cuban moves the hands.

In some ways I believe music is the more convincing communicator of ideas than words. For instance, we can hear of Kordaly and Bartok and recognise them as Hungarian, but very few of us speak Hungarian, but the music itself speaks to more people.

Historical grammar is a study of how, say, modern English developed from Middle English, and how that developed from Early and Old English, and how that developed from Germanic, and that developed from what's called Proto-Indo-European, a source system that nobody speaks, so you have to try to reconstruct it.

All my mom's side speaks Spanish. I speak to my grandparents in Spanish. Slowly. And they're patient with me! But I do speak with them in Spanish and carry on conversations with them.

There are lots of actors who insist on speaking the lines themselves, and you hear the same thing from directors and the audience, but I don't think it's worth getting het up about. I think it makes more sense to use someone who speaks that country's language: that's what voice actors are for.

When you want to make a film abroad, you need producers and people who support you. You need a team that speaks your language.

In Buenos Aires, I have a very close friend who speaks very good English, and she taught me. It was quite difficult because the muscles of your mouth are used to your language, and then when you want to speak another language, they don't go to the place they need to go to make the sound.

With some writers, the script looks beautiful on the page, but nobody actually speaks like that.

There's a very particular way that the military speaks. There's a lot of profanity and a lot of acronyms.

It's one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.

Because my parents are Indian, everybody speaks Hindi to me, and I have no idea what they are saying.

I'm someone that speaks with their pads.

A voice and an accent are two very different things. The voice of a man is how he speaks from his heart, right in the middle of him... And then you stick an accent on top of that.

I find it really difficult when you make a movie where it is set in Russia and everyone speaks in English. It drives me crazy.

I think the hardest accent for me to do is what I end up trying a lot of times, and it's like some sort of a general American sound. So not Southern and not east-coast or west-coast, but just a general American sound that no one really speaks, actually.

Music - it speaks to everyone. Music speaks to everyone on so many different levels.

My father's a diplomat. He speaks Russian.