Chinua Achebe Quotes

By county, there's like 14 different accents in Mississippi alone. And now, present day, a Mississippi accent is different than in 1963. So we had a dialect coach, which is like going to visit France and having to translate all your emotions into French, and French isn't your first language. I had to go through that filter, so it was interesting.

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.

Languages are not owned by nations but by the people who use them and make them live.

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

All living languages are promiscuous. We promiscuous speakers shamelessly shoplift words, plucking bons mots and phrases from any tempting language. We wear these words when we wish to be more formal, more elegant, more mysterious, worldly, precise, vague.

When I'm in the U.K. I find myself using a lot of Britishisms.

A few words of Hindi appear here or there, but it's all Urdu. I feel that if the popular culture, which is what Hindi films are, uses Urdu, it's not going to diminish.

Well, I have a Norwegian father who emigrated to America in the 1950s, and he still speaks with varying degrees of an accent. Over my lifetime my ear has been well-tuned to that accent. Any first generation kid has that wonderful gift from their parents.

Each language has its own take on the world. That's why a translation can never be absolutely exact, and therefore, when you enter another language and speak with its speakers, you become a slightly different person; you learn a different sort of world.

Urdu can not die out because it has very strong roots in Persia. The language itself is not only just the language of the Muslims, but it's also the language of the Hindus.

I do that in whatever language of the country I'm in, because the audience appreciate it.

My mom used to call me a parrot, because the way I spoke would change in every country we'd go to.

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.

I think mine's such a mish-mash now: I get criticised for sounding like a Yank when I come home, and everybody thinks I'm Australian when I'm in America.

My natural accent is American. I chose to speak with a U.K. accent when I was about to enter the final year at drama school in London. I was going to try to find a way to stay in the U.K. after I finished college and could not imagine trying to live and get work there with an American accent.

It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist.

If you talk about language in the Caribbean, you must relate it to history.

Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.

Unlike our neighbours on the mainland of Europe, we have resisted creating an academy to legislate over proper English. We each have our linguistic bugbear, but few of us would want to freeze our mother tongue.

Though most of my titles are translated into about 7 to 8 languages, I feel that translations, to some extent, can lose the flavour of the colloquial words used otherwise in the regional narrative.

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.

English has always been a mongrel tongue, snapping up words from every continent its speakers encountered.

Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican.