Language Insecurity Quotes

When I speak to people from Britain, that's when I feel like a fake, speaking with an American accent.

I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.

I had to struggle with the language. I can understand Hindi now, but I still can't communicate. And things get lost in translation; I feel rejected all the time.

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

I could never muster the courage to speak to girls in my college in Pune. Most of them were Parsis and spoke English. I came from a village and could barely converse in English.

It is a sore point, because you do have advantages if you have access to more than one language. You also have problems, because on bad days you don't trust yourself, either in your first or your second language, and so you feel like a complete halfwit.

When you live in a country where your own language is considered foreign, you can feel a continuous sense of estrangement. You speak a secret, unknown language, lacking any correspondence to the environment. An absence that creates a distance within you.

Before I look stupid and not know what a word means or how to pronounce it, I'll stop the whole production: 'Hey, real quick, guys. Define this word for me. Somebody.'

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

People are often shy to acknowledge that they are Bengalis. They somehow take pride in saying that they cannot speak or read the language.

I sometimes feel nervous because I give stupid answers to certain pointless questions. It happens in Turkish as much as in English. I speak bad Turkish and utter stupid sentences.

I was very nervous about the accent. I was very nervous about being an American.