Jason Reynolds Quotes

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.

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

There is no linguistic war in Montreal.

We will never have "a" Chicano English or Spanish because of regional differences. But I think that because of our bilingual history, we'll always be speaking a special kind of English and Spanish. What we do have to do is fight for the right to use those two languages in the way that it serves us.

The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.

But what I'm very interested in, whether it's writing, whether it's hosting a show, whether it's cooking food, I'm just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.

There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages.

The reason man does not experience his true cultural self is that until he experiences another self as valid he has little basis for validating his own self.

People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.

I am not anti-English, and I never was.

If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

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

Make no mistake: one is not a better Quebecer because one speaks French. One is not less of a Quebecer because one speaks English. We all share the same rights.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

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

Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens - it is an imposition on the state.

Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.

Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.

Here's my advice to my brown friends: The next time you're on an airplane in the U.S., just speak your mother tongue. That way, no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on.

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.

Despite overwhelming support for the United States to adopt English as its official language, we have still not taken that important step.

I want to live in a Britain whose residents are determined to speak English.

There are more than thousand mother tongues spoken in our country. This is not just a number but a reason to be proud of.

As a woman of colour, as a person who is a minority, I believe its important that other people know about my language and I don't necessarily have to explain. In the same way, when I read 19th-century literature and if I have to understand a Latin phrase or a French phrase, it is incumbent upon me to learn it.