Language Adoption Quotes

Jews are the intensive form of any nationality whose language and customs they adopt.

The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs…. Christians have even forgotten their own language. There are a thousand who can express themselves with elegance, and write better poems in Arabic than the Arabs themselves.

Though representatives of many ethnic groups came together in the United States, English became their common language. Apparently, this was a natural choice. One can imagine what would have happened if members of each nation moving to the U.S. had spoken only their own tongues and refused to learn English.

After the non-Japanese Carlos Ghosn was brought in by Nissan to turn around the struggling auto manufacturer, he made English the company's official working language.

Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do *nothing* but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C.

The United States, a land of immigrants from every corner of the world, has been strengthened and unified because its newcomers have historically chosen ultimately to forgo their native language for the English language. We have all benefited from the sharing of ideas, of cultures and beliefs, made possible by a common language. We have all enriched each other.

The spirit of logical analysis should in practice blend with the practical pressure for the adoption of some form of international language, but it should not allow itself to be stampeded by it.

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech.

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.

Basic would never have surfaced because there was always a language better than Basic for that purpose. That language was Joss, which predated Basic and was beautiful. But Basic happened to be on a GE timesharing system that was done by Dartmouth, and when GE decided to franchise that, it started spreading Basic around just because it was there, not because it had any intrinsic merits whatsoever.

Some may argue that countries like Japan and China improved economically without English, but they, too, are learning English fast.

Mexicans who come to America today end up opposing assimilation. They say they are "holding on to their culture." To them, I say, "If you really wanted to hold on to your culture, you would be in favor of assimilation. You would be fearless about swallowing English and about becoming Americanized. You would be much more positive about the future, and much less afraid. That's what it means to be Mexican.

I'm pretty adamant to do an American accent because you get it immediately.

The older I got, the more willing I was to go into the Southern vernacular, because some of it's funny.

We know from our recent history that English did not come to replace U.S. Indian languages merely because English sounded musical to Indians' ears. Instead, the replacement entailed English-speaking immigrants' killing most Indians by war, murder, and introduced diseases, and the surviving Indians' being pressured into adopting English, the new majority language.

I don't speak cockney and I don't pretend to come from that part of the world. For the longest time the English, like the Beatles and so on sounded American. "She loves you yeah yeah yeah!" All of the sudden you sound American. It doesn't work that way with Americans who try to sing English. It's not convincing. If I say "Footy" and "tele" and "Brissy" and "Sydney" and "Simmo" it's not convincing.

English is taking over the world. I just wrote a piece about it. And it's not by design. The United States dominates because it's the biggest market.

In China, when you get to the airport everyone be talking in American slang.

However virile the English language may be, it can never become the language of the masses of India.

I felt like hip-hop was my music, it was like my outsider music... but then my mom started answering our phone, 'Yo, what's up.' She was hearing me talk to my friends. I was like, 'No, mom, don't cop the hip-hop talk.'

One does, after all, take on many of the givens of a society when one takes on its language.