Language Prejudice Quotes

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it ought to be good enough for the children of Texas.

I think people are really picky about English accents. When a Brit comes over here and kind of does an OK American accent, everyone's like, 'You were great! Fantastic!' But in England, even if you were doing a pretty good accent, they're like, 'But where are you from?' 'London.' 'What part of London?' Accents are really precious over there.

You know, even growing up going to school, I had teachers that were against bilingual teaching. I never understood that. My parents always had me speak Spanish first knowing I was going to speak English in school.

On my best day, I cannot do Scottish people. I don't even believe that's a real accent, to be honest with you. I think they probably sound like us when they're in the house. It's how they keep people away from them.

Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens - it is an imposition on the state.

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.

I don't like doing things without understanding the meaning. Once I walked out of a film event as I could not stand the insult they meted out to a Sanskrit verse.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one.

I chose English-speaking and English-thinking people to take decisions for Hindi programmes. It was a mistake.

So what's really behind the 'English Only' Movement? Fear. Fear of being taken over and one day they will have to learn something different. Heaven forbid they would have to learn something new.

They said [on a day show], oh, you can't do a Chinese accent. That's - and I said, I'm not doing a Chinese accent. I'm doing my friend's accent. And they said, yeah, you can't do that. And I said, OK, but can I do a Russian accent? And they said, yeah, yeah, of course, you can do that. I said, and a British accent? They said, yeah, go ahead. And I couldn't understand.

Speaking Spanish isn't a benefit in Hollywood.

When an English man speaks well, for example now, and this is another way of putting us down, they say he's "eloquent" you see. "Oh, eloquent chap they are!" An Irish person speak well, they say, "Ah, you have the gift of the gab." "Ah, you kissed the blarney stone." You see, all of this putting us down.

The one thing that no Anglo-Saxon can stand is to be ruled by someone who 'talks fancy' by using Latinate words too often.

You're not from Puerto Rico, so you should say Puerto Rico like all the other people from the place that you come from.

When I was a kid, I resented my grandparents not speaking the perfect English I wanted to speak.

In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn't really talking white; it was talking different.

In my own writing, I avoid 'female' and try to say 'woman' because I feel that the word 'female' has connotations of not just biology but also non-human mammals. The idea of 'female' to me is more appropriate for a female animal.

Because I had an accent, people had this impression that I was dumb.

I didn't always value the ways black people talked. I thought, in order to make art out of it, you had to change it.

I always wonder whether I'll get treated differently with a different accent.

After all, enforced national bilingualism in this country isn't mere policy. It has attained the status of a religion. It's a dogma which one is supposed to accept without question.

It's problematic being an Arab who writes in Hebrew.

People are always saying, English, English, English rose, and I just feel so completely different.

I came to realize,people who had Chinese accents will continue to have Chinese accents in America are treated as being stupid or not as intelligent as an English speaker who is fluent with an American accent - I came to realize why. But it's always fascinated me how quickly you can change where you stand with another human being just based on how you speak.