Thomas Hobbes Quotes

Human language appears to be a unique phenomenon, without significant analogue in the animal world.

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It took seven languages to make me; it would be nice if I could have spoken just one.

To suppose that man without language taught himself to speak, seems to me as absurd as it would be to suppose that without legs he could teach himself to walk. Language, therefore, must have been the immediate gift of God.

Our common language is English. And our common task is to ensure that our non-English-speaking children learn this common language.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

I speak English, so I am no longer cute. My tongue itches for French.

No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried.

I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

All languages had their birth, their apogee and decline.

My biggest regret is that I didn't teach my two children how to speak Spanish.

I speak English with my dad and Swedish with my mom; it's quite schizophrenic.

I have only so many foreign-language neurons. When I learned Spanish, that displaced whatever Irish was left, and then I learned German, and that displaced the Spanish, and when I learned Serbo-Croatian, that displaced the German. So I'm a bit of a muddle.

The idea of Homo monolinguis - one-languaged man - the idea of children having to grow into one system before we confuse them with another mental system, is an idea with which, unfortunately, many people are brought up now.

English, for me, is an acquired language. I started with English at the age of 10. At the time, it was my third language.

All the kids are learning different languages. I asked them what languages they wanted to learn, and Shi is learning Khmai, which is a Cambodian language; Pax is focusing on Vietnamese, Mad has taken to German and Russian, Z is speaking French, Vivienne really wanted to learn Arabic, and Knox is learning sign language.

My Finnish, it never really happened, but I'm good in Swedish.

I've been working in three-four languages. I'm happy to do it.

If you go back a century in Europe, all over the place people were speaking different languages. There were dozens of languages in France and Italy, and they're all called French [and Italian], but they were not mutually comprehensible. They were different languages. And they have mostly disappeared in the last century or so. Some are being preserved, like Welsh, some are being revived, like Basque or Catelan to some extent. There are plenty of people in Europe who can't talk to their grandmother because they talk a different language.

I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.

...language is not the frosting, it's the cake.

They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.

As humans we speak one language.

Language is the tool of my trade -and I use them all - all the Englishes I grew up with