Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa Quotes

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Math and science fields are not the only areas where we see the United States lagging behind. Less than 1 percent of American high school students study the critical foreign languages of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean or Russian, combined.

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

I grew up speaking both languages, and for me that's really important.

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.

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

The knowledge of the ancient languages is mainly a luxury.

Citizens of Canada of whom any child has received or is receiving primary or secondary school instruction in English or French in Canada, have the right to have all their children receive primary and secondary school instruction in the same language.

My parents did not want us to lose our culture and our language. And that was a good thing.

Most of my family doesn't speak English. It's so important for the baby. He's going to know all his American roots, but he also needs to know about his Brazilian side.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

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.

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

There is no question of the government or myself attaching less importance to the use of English.

Latin is beautiful and has become something of an international language, but there is also something about singing in your native language that has meaning.

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.

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