Family Language Quotes

We of French origin have the sentiment of our own individuality. We want to hand down to our children the language we received from our forefathers.

Bilingual-education advocates say it's important to teach a child in his or her family's language. I say you can't use family language in the classroom - the very nature of the classroom requires that you use language publicly.

I speak Spanish to my children and they speak it better than me.

In my house, we speak Spanglish to the dogs, to the grandchildren, to the kids.

My grandfather spoke fluent Spanish and I have family members who speak fluent Spanish.

Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world

Mom spoke to us in Swiss when we were little.

I do chat to my mother in Norwegian, particularly when we want a secret conversation. It is useful that way.

I might be more fluent in Swedish than I am in Spanish. My wife speaks it to our kids, and they're fluent so I hear it all the time, so I've got that under my belt.

I haven't even grown up on Hindi films because my Hindi is bad; I am a Parsi and we speak English or Gujarati at home.

We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle.

I don't swear much; I've taken those words out of my vocabulary, and having kids, you have to have two sets of language!

I would love to adopt a child from a Spanish speaking country, because I want to have Spanish in the home.

I regret not paying a bit more attention to Welsh lessons at school. My Welsh is pretty ropey, as back at my school, people didn't take Welsh lessons seriously. My dad can speak it, so I wish he'd taught me some growing up.

Yes, I'm half Italian. So my grandfather speaks heavy Italian... and I couldn't understand a word he said.

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.

My father had barely any education. He could hardly write or count. But his great pride was that he was perfectly bilingual. In the household, he entertained this idea that we had to speak both languages.

Language-wise, my mom and dad's dialect, they're pretty obscure. It's Chinese, but not your traditional Chinese, like Cantonese or Mandarin. It wasn't something that I got to use very much growing up. We eventually just spoke English around the house.

I learned Spanish at home and, since half my family doesn't speak English, it's my first language.

Most of my family speaks fluent Malayalam.

My biggest regret is that I didn't teach my two children how to speak Spanish.

I definitely want to teach my daughter Spanish.

My parents were both Spanish-speakers and they used to speak to me and my siblings in Spanish and we'd answer them in English.

Now we have this idea that, not only do you go to first grade to learn your family's language, but you go to a university to learn about the person you were before you left home.

When you're around your family, and you have that history and that shared language, you say things you'd be embarrassed to hear quoted back to you later.