Language Isolation Quotes

When I was 11, I moved to the United States with my two brothers and my mom. We moved to northern New York, up near the Canadian border, from Argentina, and there was nobody there that spoke Spanish, and because there was no internet at the time, not even cable TV yet, I lost the connection with my childhood friends and the culture I had been brought up with for my first decade completely.

Nobody speaks German outside of Germany.

The language with which I make my poems has nothing to do with one spoken here, or anywhere.

Attempting to build a language wall around Quebec is precisely the wrong policy to follow. It will keep out of Quebec exactly what we need to attract by way of talent and capital; it will drive our best - francophones as well as allophones and anglophones, with their talents and capital - to leave Quebec.

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.

Basque is one of the world's more alarming languages. Only a handful of adult foreigners, they say, have ever managed to learn it. The Devil tried once and mastered only three words - profanities, I assume.

Everybody at home speaks mandarin except me.

It was very difficult to leave Argentina when I was kid, so I only spoke Spanish for the first six years of my life.

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.

If I speak my version of Spanish in Spain, they laugh. Same with Mexico. It's an alien world to me.

I have no problem living in Liverpool, but I think my wife and daughters deserve to enjoy every day to the full and live their lives - but they have to be at home all day. My wife doesn't speak a word of English, so she depends 100% on me. I live here with them. That's my world, that's my life.

It's one thing to be writing in South or Latin America, where, except for Brazil, every country, however small and hard to find on a map, speaks Spanish, but quite another to be writing in, say, Hungary, a landlocked nation of 10 million people, with a language that very few people outside Hungary can read or speak.

There are very few places in the world where you have to learn a language with no language in common. It's called a monolingual field situation.

Being a third-generation Mexican-American and speaking English exclusively, I heard Spanish spoken by my relatives all my life, especially when they didn't want me to understand what they were talking about.

Only it seems to me that once in your life before you die you ought to see a country where they don't talk in English and don't even want to.

The Germans and I no longer speak the same language.

Denmark is like a secret little place with its own special language.

In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.

From 1 till 7, when we moved to England, I spoke only Portuguese.

One limits oneself in this country if you come as a legal immigrant to this country and you choose to only speak your language whether it be Polish or Russian like many of my own relatives who came here if you speak only Russian and Polish you're limiting your opportunities in the United States.