Language Respect Quotes

Maybe my job on this planet is to make the Asian accent sexy.

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

It is okay to experiment with language. Writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf experimented with writing, but basically, one must have a familiarity with the language. And to have that, one must respect it.

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.

He who does not love his own language is worse than an animal and smelly fish.

I remember one English teacher in the eighth grade, Florence Schrack, whose husband also taught at the high school. I thought what she said made sense, and she parsed sentences on the blackboard and gave me, I'd like to think, some sense of English grammar and that there is a grammar, that those commas serve a purpose and that a sentence has a logic, that you can break it down. I've tried not to forget those lessons, and to treat the English language with respect as a kind of intricate tool.

There is a wealth of readership for regional language literature in India that is not given importance. We must give respect to our own languages.

Her voice was slightly accented but her French was perfect. Someone who'd not just learned the language but loved it. And it showed with every syllable. Gamache knew it was impossible to split language from culture. That without one the other withered. To love the language was to respect the culture.

How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.

It annoys me when I phone a hotel receptionist in my own country, and they don't understand what I am saying because they don't speak English. I think that's wrong. It's nothing to do with being politically correct or incorrect; it's just not right.

Recording a Hindi song takes me around 40 minutes whereas a Kannada song takes me about two hours. The music isn't a problem, since the notes used are universal. The language is the problem. I try my best to get it right, as I'm sensitive about respecting every language, since all of them are sacred in my heart.

There is no such thing as an ugly language. Today I hear every language as if it were the only one, and when I hear of one that is dying, it overwhelms me as though it were the death of the earth.

I am critical of the parochial understanding of the Francophone movement and feel that it is used as a justification for not learning the language of the “other”. Those who respect the “other” are those who know them, and those who reject the language of the “other” are at a disadvantage. Learning the language of the “other” does not contradict our rejection of the dominance of their language, which is quite valid in my opinion.

Students often have such a lofty idea of what a poem is, and I want them to realize that their own lives are where the poetry comes from. The most important things are to respect the language; to know the classical rules, even if only to break them; and to be prepared to edit, to revise, to shape.

The French no longer respect their language, because they no longer love themselves, and, no longer loving themselves, they no longer love what was the instrument of their glory - their language.

There is no linguistic war in Montreal.

The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.

When I go to Colombia or Mexico, I speak Spanish. When I go to Italy, I speak Italian. When I'm in Germany, I speak German. Would I expect them to speak English in these countries? No. I mean, great if they do, but no. Would I be offended if in Spain they say we speak Spanish? No. If I was an immigrant there, no.

For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.

One thing I wish I'd been told in school is that my language is valid.

Practice, learn the lines, work hard, don't be too respectful. Sometimes we can get too hung up on the fact that the material of the play is very finely wrought language.

All the academy will tell you that the language that is familiar to you is not appropriate. and that's not to say that there shouldn't be a standard, but when I come to school with my friends' language, my grandmother's language, the language in my mouth - you're going to tell me that's improper?

If you go to Paris, try to speak French. If you go to the South, try to speak Southern. Southern isn't stupid. Southern is narrative; Southern is family.

You must be able to write. You must have a sense of form, of pattern, of design. You must have a respect for and a mastery over words.

The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.