Mark Twain Quotes

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

Many words are in a state of mutation, the pronunciation being unsettled even in the best society, a result that must often arise where language is as variable and undetermined as the English.

The English language is nobody's special property.

Those who sniff decay in every shift of sense or alteration of usage do the language no service. Too often for such people the notion of good English has less to do with expressing ideas clearly than with making words conform to some arbitrary pattern.

I don't think the elite class is only speaking the good English.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

Language changes very fast.

England and America are two countries separated by the same language.

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.

Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself.

English is an outrageous tangle of those derivations and other multifarious linguistic influences, from Yiddish to Shoshone, which has grown up around a gnarly core of chewy, clangorous yawps derived from ancestors who painted themselves blue to frighten their enemies.

Viewed freely, the English language is the accretion and growth of every dialect, race, and range of time, and is both the free and compacted composition of all.

The most important fact of the 20th century will be that the English and the Americans speak the same language.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.

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.

All the academy will tell you that the language that is familiar to you is not appropriate. and that's not to say that there shouldn't be a standard, but when I come to school with my friends' language, my grandmother's language, the language in my mouth - you're going to tell me that's improper?

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

Language became a colorless and as indistinct as the business suit which is now worm by everyone, by the scholar, by the businessman, by the professional killer. Being accustomed to a dry and dreary norm and sees in it an obvious sign of arrogance and aggression; viewing authority with almost religious awe he gets into a frenzy when he sees someone pluck the beard of his favorite prophet.

Malcolm Bradbury made the point, and I don't know whether it's a valid one or not, that the real English at the moment is not the English spoken in England or in America or even in Canada or Australia or New Zealand. The real English is the English which is a second language, so that it's rather like Latin in the days of the Roman Empire when people had their own languages, but had Latin in order to communicate.

It was decided almost two hundred years ago that English should be the language spoken in the United States. It is not known, however, why this decision has not been carried out.

I like to be beholden to the great metropolitan English speech, the sea which receives tributaries from every region under heaven.

The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel.