Language Revitalization Quotes

While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.

I think we should get more behind te reo. Being able to see a friend and have a conversation, it would be great if we could get to that stage.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

Languages are not owned by nations but by the people who use them and make them live.

Absolutely nothing is so important for a nation's culture as its language.

I think it's about the feeling more than a language. And I think that we and every culture in the world has to keep their own language just to bring something else, something different, and show a different vision of the world, actually. And that's why I'm trying to keep my language.

It is not quite true to say that I am not an advocate of writing in African languages. What I think is, one has to think about what is practicable.

Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.

Yes, living voices in a living language, so it seemed to us.

When I was a college student and I got interested in linguistics the concern among students was, this is a lot of fun, but after we have done a structural analysis of every language in the world what's left? It was assumed there were basically no puzzles.

Language is also a place of struggle.

A language, like a species, when extinct, never... reappears.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

The Government honoring our treaties and sovereignty is first and foremost. These issues are still the top priority which [Barak] Obama, if elected, has promised us. For us, we should implement the most impor-tant programs right now: they are programs to teach the children a positive sense of dignity, self-worth, and the importance of sustaining their culture, history, language and honor as a people.

The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.

According to the United Nations' latest count, of the approximately 3,000 languages spoken in the world today, only some 78 have a literature. Of those 78, a scant five or six enjoy a truly international audience.

The Hawaiian language needs to be studied globally as a language of life.

Within a language, you have your roots, your culture, and I think and dream in Bassa. We have 260 languages in Cameroon, but the official ones are French and English.

Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

I want to keep talking about my people and my country in my own language.

If French is no longer the language of a power, it can be the language of a counter power.

When you get to speak Irish, you become more at one with yourself, you kind of have a spark when you use it, and I think it's a great dialect.

I have a high regard for Native languages and the pivotal role they have played in our nation's history.

I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried.

Both sameness and difference are issues for us. A sign of cultural homogenization is that languages are disappearing at an alarming rate. I am heartened by signs that some peoples are fighting back, e.g., the revitalization of the language of the Wampanoag tribe in Massachusetts. But if we reject essentialism about culture, we will be cautious about overgeneralizing about what homogenization is and to what degree it exists. If we think of cultures as dynamic, internally diverse and contested, we will be aware that what looks like homogenization may be deeper down this more complicated thing.