Sonia Sotomayor 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.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

Our parents decided not to teach us Chinese. It was an era when they felt we would be better off if we didn't have that complication.

To be the child of immigrants from Eastern Europe is in itself a special kind of experience; and an important one to an author. He has heard two languages through childhood, the one spoken with ease at home, and the other spoken with ease in the streets and at school, but spoken poorly at home.

Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English.

Most Arab Israelis speak Hebrew, but not the other way around. It's about time that changed.

One of the biggest problems is - you know, I've got some Hispanic friends - is that a lot of those folks that don't know English, is primarily because they don't even know Spanish. They don't even know their own language.

I'm different. I don't speak perfect American. I do have a lilt of an Indian accent. I thought, 'Maybe the world's not okay with what I bring, being Indian.'

Growing up, my mom always knew that I was more on the Black side than the Spanish side, just because I didn't speak Spanish.

I was very different than everybody else growing up. I spoke a different language at home, I ate different food, and I looked different. So I could always relate to Aladdin in that way, being the outcast.

I had a weird accent. Dutch people speak American English, and my parents were Jamaican, with their own broken English.

I was raised to be kind. My parents were underdogs. Immigrant Jews. I spoke with an accent. I didn't speak English even - I spoke French and Yiddish mostly. I was picked on.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

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

I want people to experience what it's like being from Haiti, coming to America, being Wyclef - multicultural, multilingual.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

It's old news, me and my accent, but it always seems to make headlines.

When I was a girl, there wasn't anything in Spanish in the movies until you saw it on DVD.

I'm trying to talk to my kids in Japanese, because I'm not a pro English speaker. My wife speaks to them in English. That's her first language. I don't want my kids to feel the same as me when I was studying English. It was so frustrating.

I grew up having two different perspectives - one in English, one in Spanish. Two different cultures, very different - but I think that, to me, it's one. I'm just as American as I feel Latin.

You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?

I don't know if I'm truly at home in any language.

We spoke French at home and I didn't know any English until I went to school. My mother was French and met my father when he visited France as a student on a teaching placement.

The English was really my mother, it was never me. Being the daughter of my father, I always felt very French.