Noam Chomsky Quotes

I doubt that national languages will disappear. In fact, to some extent they're becoming more diverse, like in Europe.

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.

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

I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.

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.

My accent's become a weird hybrid.

Henceforth, language studies were no longer directed merely towards correcting grammar.

Afrikaans is my first language, although you would never know, as my English accent has more of an American-British thing going on from all my years of travelling.

As a matter of fact, a national language which spreads beyond its own confines very quickly loses much of its original richness of content and is in no better case than a constructed language.

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

Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.

We shall now cease using the eloquent language (Arabic) …. We would fain speak in the Persian tongue that perchance the people of Persia, one and all, may become aware of the utterances of the merciful Lord, and come forth to discover the Truth.

Our Constitution has affirmed that Gaelic is the national language. Yet there is scarcely one person in a thousand throughout Ireland who cannot speak English and scarcely one in ten who can speak Irish easily.

Bilingualism lets you have your cake and eat it. The new language opens the doors to the best jobs in society; the old language allows you to keep your sense of 'who you are.' It preserves your identity. With two languages, you have the best of both worlds.

Mom developed an interest in 'heritage-language education after noticing an increasing number of students in her UCLA classes whose parents were Russian.

Unlike Conrad or Nabokov, I didn't have circumstances which would have coerced me out of my native tongue altogether.

I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity - they form part of the linguistic color of a period.

You can't be an American if you don't speak English. Our public schools should be mandated to teach all children in English.

I am opposed to the idea of dubbing films into Kannada.

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

Belgium is half French-speaking and half Flemish, and I was born on the French side. So we spoke it a lot - like, in kindergarten, it was almost all French. But then I moved to New Zealand when I was 10, where we obviously spoke English all the time, so I lost the French a little bit.

I'm a big believer in change and embrace the fact that English is probably the fastest-moving language in the world.

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.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.