Antonin Artaud Quotes

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation's history.

I think it's about the feeling more than a language. And I think that we and every culture in the world has to keep their own language just to bring something else, something different, and show a different vision of the world, actually. And that's why I'm trying to keep my language.

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language.

To rescue from oblivion even a fragment of a language which men have used and which is in danger of being lost -that is to say, one of the elements, whether good or bad, which have shaped and complicated civilization -is to extend the scope of social observation and to serve civilization.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Literature is memory written down. All literature is memory.

The places I come from have such rich languages, such a variety of expression. In Sierra Leone we have about fifteen languages and three dialects. I grew up speaking about seven of them.

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

People forget that there are villages and communities that are still speaking French all over Canada. I went to a bar and spoke with some French people there, and they were saying: 'I went to English school, but at home it was always French, and that's going to be the way it is for my kids.' It's important for them to keep that language alive.

I do not speak Hebrew, but I understand that it has no word for 'history.' The closest word for it is memory.

Writing preserves only the thought of literate peoples.

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.

There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.

Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next.

I had grandparents who were native Irish speakers, and also, two of the four grandparents were illiterate.

I used to speak Algerian, but I'd lost nearly everything.

We used to speak Irish - Gaelic Irish - around the dinner table, but over the years, we lost that.

Within a language, you have your roots, your culture, and I think and dream in Bassa. We have 260 languages in Cameroon, but the official ones are French and English.

Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.