Noam Chomsky Quotes

You couldn't have human society without language.

Language is a social art.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

A man who is ignorant of foreign languages is also ignorant of his own language.

Language is an art, like brewing or baking.... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.

No child is capable of speech until he has heard other human beings speak, and even two infants reared together cannot develop a language from scratch.

I don't speak anything fluently, but I love picking up languages and I do this Duolingo app. I started when I moved to Sweden, when I was about 19, 20. I really loved the language; it was super melodic and really sexy.

Language is, without a doubt, the most momentous and at the same time the most mysterious product of the human mind.

I listen to people talking sometimes, that great river that is language, with all its undercurrents of grammar and nuance, and I wonder how we all learn so quickly to speak it, given that we begin when we are barely old enough to stand upright. I have no memory of finding it hard. Indeed, I have no memory of it at all.

How many languages can a child learn? As many as you will take the time to teach them.

Language helps develp life as surely as it reflects life. It is a most important part of our human condition.

I feel my poetry has contributed through all these languages that I needed to learn leading up to English.

The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior.

The fact that all normal children acquire essentially comparable grammars of great complexity with remarkable rapidity suggests that human beings are somehow specially designed to do this, with data-handling or 'hypothesis-formulating' ability of unknown character and complexity.

Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain.

Children pick up words as pigeons peas And utter them again as God shall please.

The fact is that if you have not developed language, you simply don't have access to most of human experience, and if you don't have access to experience, then you're not going to be able to think properly.

I listen a lot to how people speak. I've read a great many good books in my life. I had some excellent English teachers. Surely, those things were helpful.

For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules-- it hasn't been taught to us by means of strict rules, either. We, in our discussions on the other hand, constantly compare language with a calculus preceding to exact rules.

Language instruction should start in the first grade. Writing, also.

Every American child should grow up knowing a second language, preferably English.

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English.

Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?

That's why it's important to be multilingual, because it teaches you so much about your own language.