Quotes About Language

The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.

I didn't know at first that there were two languages in Canada.I just thought that there was one way to speak to my father and another to talk to my mother.

Language is the mother, not the handmaiden, of thought; words will tell you things you never thought or felt before.

The mother tongue is propaganda.

Everything can change, but not the language that we carry inside us, like a world more exclusive and final than one's mother's womb.

My mother always told me I had to do 100 times better than a man. I had to work hard at maths, and learn four languages.

What is a nation without a mother tongue?

The word "wilderness" occurs approximately three hundred times in the Bible, and all its meanings are derogatory.

Heard about the young deaf boy who used sign language-One day he told his mother a dirty joke and she washed his hands out with soap

I'm never proper or careful, but I never curse in front of my mother, either.

I recognize but one mental acquisition as a necessary part of the education of a lady or gentlemen, namely, an accurate and refined use of the mother tongue.

See that your children are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother tongue, and then let them proceed to higher branches of learning.

If the English educated neglect, as they have done and even now continue, as some do, to be ignorant of their mother tongue, linguistic starvation will abide.

Reagan's genius as a communicator lies in his use of ambiguity. ... Ambiguity is the mother of Teflon.

[My mother tongue is] Albanian. But, I am equally fluent in Bengali (language of Calcutta) and English.

I have a dirty mouth sometimes, and I'm very liberal, and that doesn't always go down well in the film industry - especially when you've got to appeal to mums and daughters.

I think that people assumed I was white because of my last name. My father is Caucasian, my mother is Hispanic. But English was my second language, believe it or not.

Simple English is no one's mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

Censorship is the mother of metaphor.

How often a mother initiates a conversation with her child is not predictive of the language outcomes - what matters is, if the infant initiates, whether the mom responds.

That's so different in Hong Kong when I'm using my own mother language, I can treat the line in one thousand different ways, with many different reactions.

I had the luck that my parents educated me in three languages. With my mother I spoke Dutch, with my father Italian, and in the school I learned German. But my host language is Italian.

Speech is the mother, not the handmaid, of thought.

Don't worry about what your mother thinks of your language.