Quotes About Multilingualism

The world doesn't revolve around English.

no real scientist would allow their thoughts to be hamstrung by the conceptual limitations of a single language.

aujourd'hui encore, l'allemand, l'alsacien et le français se disputent dans ma tête et brouillent mon élocution ; aujourd'hui encore, je me déplace avec un dictionnaire allemand-français dans mes affaires.

I have sung in over 20 different languages and enjoyed it. I have even sung in foreign languages like Spanish and Russian.

But a world in which all intercultural communication was carried out in a single idiom would not diminish the variety of human tongues. It would just make native speakers of the international medium less sophisticated users of language than all others, since they alone would have only one language to think with.

Few inhabitants of the subcontinent have ever been monoglot; citizens of India have traditionally spoken three, four, or five tongues.1

Lymond made no concessions on the grounds of language. If they fought abroad they would be expected as a matter of course to speak as their allies did. If they did not already know several European languages, then they must learn.

Among the disciples of Jesus, it seems most likely that at least Philip was bilingual in Aramaic and Greek.

I'm a good student. Just trying to learn as much as possible is how I picked up so many languages.

When you used to be able to express yourself as an adult in your own language, or as I can do in English, for instance, it's sometimes hard to switch back to very simple talking, like I am forced to do in Finnish. So a real conversation, when I really wanna tell something, I can't do it in Finnish.

and Bengali literature – in sum, 'an awesome polyglot, the

Sometimes I am a different character in different languages. I have different enjoyment from them. Sometimes different answers come out of me. Like, I didn't even know that about me. I get to know myself through different languages, actually.

I suppose my ideal brain food is learning languages.

A man reacheth not to excellence with one language.

I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language.

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

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.

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

An unalterable and unquestioned law of the musical world required that the German text of French operas sung by Swedish artists should be translated into Italian for the clearer understanding of English-speaking audiences.

I am by nature a self-improver. I have read Gibbon, I have read Proust. I read the Old and New Testaments and most of Shakespeare. I studied French. I have meditated. I jogged. I learned to draw, using the right side of my brain.

I'm about as monolingual as you come, but nevertheless, I have a variety of different languages at my command, different styles, different ways of talking, which do involve different parameter settings.

I read everything. I'll read a John Grisham novel, I'll sit and read a whole book of poems by Maya Angelou, or I'll just read some Mary Oliver - this is a book that was given to me for Christmas. No particular genre. And I read in French, and I read in German, and I read in English. I love to see how other people use language.

I do not speak Malayalam and am putting strenuous effort in developing command over the language.