Natalie Clifford Barney Quotes

I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried.

It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.

There's a tremendous amount of language loss. Most of the attention is given to indigenous languages, which makes sense, but some of the most dramatic language loss is in Europe.

The position is: the Gaelic language is no longer the native language; it is dead, yet food is being brought to the graveyard.

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

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.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

She is convinced that when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat, not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise. In her country children have bitten their tongues off and use bullets instead to iterate the voice of speechlessness, of disabled and disabling language, of language adults have abandoned altogether as a device for grappling with meaning, providing guidance, or expressing love.

Language is decanted and shared. If only one person is left alive speaking a language - the case with some American Indian languages - the language is dead. Language takes two and their multiples.

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.

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.

I am determined to give the Yiddish language a fighting chance to survive.

There were about 6,000 languages spoken on this planet at the beginning of the 20th century, there are probably only 600 still widely spoken at the beginning of the 21st century. Together with biodiversity, cultural and linguistic diversity are fading fast.

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.

To what better purpose can a man's energy be devoted, and his talents, than the resuscitation of his country's language?

A community, once it realises that its language is in danger, can get its act together and introduce measures which can genuinely revitalise. You've seen it happen in Australia with several Aboriginal languages. And it's happening in other countries, too.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.

I want to keep talking about my people and my country in my own language.

I don't see how English as we use it in Europe can be revivified. It's like Latin must have been in about A.D. 300, tired and used up. All one can do is press very hard stylistically to make it glow.

It wasn't so long ago that it was not popular to speak Gaelic in Ireland because the areas that Gaelic is spoken in were much poorer areas.

From antiquity, Latin died but is still studied in seminaries and elite universities. So did Sanskrit in Asia. iI was replaced by Pali, but even Pali died, too. Linguists say the only ancient language which was resuscitated from the grave was Hebrew of Israel.

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

I always speak Welsh to my family.