Marcus Tullius Cicero Quotes

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

I have a funny accent in every language.

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.

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

In Belgium there are Walloons and Flemings.

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

It is an absolute privilege to be able to speak another language and have it be something you grew up with. I think it's a very important thing and I think that everywhere else in the world people speak more than one language.

When people speak their own language you get a much better sense of who they are.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

The Ethiopians say that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs have light blue eyes and red hair.

I'm against the idea of force-feeding all of Canada on two languages.

A nation is not a linguistic unit. The English-speaking peoples, whether under the Union Jack or not, are, with one exception, not English; neither are the German-speaking Swiss and Austrians German, nor the French-speaking Swiss and Belgians and Canadians French.

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.

I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.

There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.

Bilingualism is a great asset for any individual, but it has perilous consequences for a nation.

It's one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.

I'm always very careful to say I'm Irish-Ethiopian because I feel Ethiopian and I look Ethiopian and I am Ethiopian. But there are 81 languages in Ethiopia, and I don't know any of them.

I am Afrikaans. It wasn't ever something that I thought about.

Since I grew up in Palakkad, I am comfortable speaking both Tamil and Malayalam.

If my mom came to the sets, we would speak to her in Tulu, and no one would understand. That's an advantage when you know any South Indian language.

My mother is half Malayali and half Tamilian. I can speak Bengali and Tamil, but can't read or write.

In South Africa, we speak English and sometimes Afrikaans, sometimes Zulu, sometimes Xhosa.

Language is very deceiving. In certain languages, there is certain vocabulary that doesn't exist in other languages. It totally changes how people feel about things.

One thing I wish I'd been told in school is that my language is valid.