John McWhorter Quotes

For me, at least, much of the German I see and hear sounds stranger than Swedish, a language of which I unfortunately understand very little.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

Nothing in my younger life could have told me I would have needed to know how to speak English.

This universe can very well be expressed in words and syllables which are not those of one's mother tongue.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I grew up, as many Indians do, in an archipelago of tongues. My maternal grandfather, who was a surgeon in the city of Madras, was fluent in at least four languages and used each of them daily.

I don't speak Filipino or Spanish, but I've sung in both.

I grew up listening to people speaking broken English. I probably picked that up. And I probably speak English almost as a second language.

Even if I think in English, it's more a language of acting than French.

Only in North America is it regarded as a major achievement to speak one language moderately well.

When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience.

I have stayed in south India all my life. English comes more naturally to me than Hindi.

Foreign languages are another favourite topic, and as these men are bilingual they have a fair notion of what it means to speak and think in many different idioms.

It's funny because I'm so used to acting in English that any time I have these moments where I have to speak Russian, it definitely takes a different part of my brain to pull it off, but it's always nice and fun.

A lot of people who live in Denmark will understand Danish but not necessarily speak it.

These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.

People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.

Everyone knows English is my second language and my vocabulary is not as broad as it is in Spanish, and because of this, sometimes I use the wrong words to express myself.

Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.

I learned English, my sixth language at this point, quite quickly.

Fools, most linguists. Damn all to say in one language, so they learn another and say damn all in that.

It is asked of me that I give my first speech in this house in a language [English] other than my mother tongue [French.] …. Even if I knew English as intimately as I knew French, I would still give my first speech in the language of my French Canadian compatriots

Globalization has brought a proliferation of such environments, so that even monolinguals must increasingly learn to live and act multilingually.