William Golding Quotes

However virile the English language may be, it can never become the language of the masses of India.

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

Most educated Indians are bilingual. Amongst the urban elite though, there is a disdain for regional languages. That's unfortunate.

I don't feel guilty about expressing myself in French; nor do I feel that I am continuing the work of the colonizers.

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.

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.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

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

We even had a different word for Christmas in my language, Bengali: Baradin, which literally meant 'big day.'

I'm the only one in my family with an American accent.

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

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

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

It is a blessing for an individual to be bilingual, but it is a curse for a society to be bilingual… A society must be able to talk amongst itself.

I am critical of the parochial understanding of the Francophone movement and feel that it is used as a justification for not learning the language of the “other”. Those who respect the “other” are those who know them, and those who reject the language of the “other” are at a disadvantage. Learning the language of the “other” does not contradict our rejection of the dominance of their language, which is quite valid in my opinion.

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.

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

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.

English is the medium of communication for people all over India.

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.