Language Heritage Quotes

I'm not against accents - my husband's from Lancashire and has a rural Lancs accent. We've just got back from Scotland yesterday, and I love that Highland burr.

A native speaker of English who has never read a word of the King James Bible is verging on the barbarian.

I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.

I'll move back to Wales if and when I have children. I want them to speak the language I speak, but I love living in London. It's my favourite city in the whole world. I love it because it's not England, it's London.

It was in Cardiff, and the cast was 60 per cent Welsh-speaking. It's the first time I've walked into a rehearsal room speaking my mother tongue, which in itself was a breath of fresh clean air from the Welsh mountains. Singing Hans Sachs is always a milestone, but I was happy to be part of such an achievement, not personally but as a company.

French was my first language.

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

My first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I'm very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.

Well, my first languages are German and Spanish because I was brought up by a Spanish mother and a German father, so I always spoke both languages at home. I'm very thankful that I was brought up in a bilingual house.

Languages are the pedigrees of nations.

My uncle is from Argentina, so I grew up hearing Spanish. My Spanish isn't very good, but my pronunciation isn't terrible.

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

My mother is a Telugu, so I have been familiar with the language since childhood.

The gift of a common tongue is a priceless inheritance and it may well some day become the foundation of a common citizenship.

I grew up speaking Spanish. The woman who helped raise me was only Spanish-speaking, so it was one of my primary languages as a kid. And I lived in Spain for a while.

I can remember only a few of the strange and curious words now dead but living and spoken by the English people a thousand years ago.

A nation without a language is a nation without a heart.

I still speak Czech with my parents because I was born there.

I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim, or any of the things I am usually called. I merely try to write as the character would write, and I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.

My mother has lived abroad and I've grown up hearing her talk, so probably that's where I get this accent from.

As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of ancient and eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did.

I grew up speaking Arabic at home.

For us Indians, I don't think English can ever exude that magic of emotions which our mother tongue can.

English is my language because of the history, and what I try to do - and I did that in 'Carpentaria' in particular - is to write in the way we tell stories and in the voice of our own people and our own way of speaking.