Yann Martel Quotes

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

I love English, though I now call it 'Anglo- American' because we no longer speak British English due to globalization and America's economic power.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

English, no longer an English language, now grows from many roots.

The English language started out as a distortion in my life, but nothing remains the same, and so the distortion is now just normal. That is one of the things that will happen to all distortions: They become normal and turn into something else.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

The French view globalization as synonymous with Americanization, the cultural imperialism that has filled France with bad food, bad films, and English words.

We are the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people.

They say that immigrants don’t speak English. So? Who cares. Even the Irish learned English after a while.

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

I love American English, not least because a lot of it was ours to begin with. Indeed, many Americanisms can be found in the works of William Shakespeare.

From the start, English has happily absorbed words from every tongue it's encountered.

Language is the crowning achievement of human beings, and that is something Muslims have always known and revered. We are a literate people whose miracle is a Book from an unlettered man, peace and blessings be upon him, who was the most articulate and eloquent human being who ever lived. We honor our Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, in honoring language that he loved so much and used so well.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

For my own part, I do not want the freedom of India if it means extinction of English or the disappearance of Englishmen.

The English language took in many many fertilizations, many many genes, from other languages, from foreign languages - Latin, French, Nordic languages, German, Scandinavian languages.

Part of what makes a language 'alive' is its constant evolution. I would hate to think Britain would ever emulate France, where they actually have a learned faculty whose job it is to attempt to prevent the incursion of foreign words into the language. I love editing Harry with Arthur Levine, my American editor-the differences between 'British English' (of which there must be at least 200 versions) and 'American English' (ditto!) are a source of constant interest and amusement to me.

Requiring this kneeling down of all languages before French is sheer linguistic imperialism.

All these shortcomings stem from the laziness of the Cambodians [Khmer]… teach them agriculture. As for language, they should be taught to speak Vietnamese. Our dress and table manners must also be followed. If there is any out-dated or barbarous custom that can be simplified or repressed, then do so.

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

I will devote the rest of my life to God’s plan and help to make the rest of the world English.

IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS, MUST ADAPT. Take It Or Leave It. I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture…. We speak mainly ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society. Learn the language! …. If you aren't happy here then LEAVE. We didn't force you to come here. You asked to be here. So accept the country YOU accepted.

The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs…. Christians have even forgotten their own language. There are a thousand who can express themselves with elegance, and write better poems in Arabic than the Arabs themselves.