Language Suppression Quotes

Countries under foreign command quickly forget their history, their past, their tradition, their national symbols, their way of living, often their own literary language.

Under the Assads, Kurds were forbidden from learning their own language at school, or even from speaking it in the military. The result is a generation of Syrian Kurds, many now in late middle age, who can't write their own language.

I had a Southern accent but I had broken it so hard.

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans--who were not allowed to learn to read and write--and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed.

I'm a Persian Jew, and we don't speak Hebrew.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

If your country is wiped off the map and your language is banned, if your literature has to serve a cause, it becomes, however brilliant, rather hard to travel.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

It wasn't so long ago that it was not popular to speak Gaelic in Ireland because the areas that Gaelic is spoken in were much poorer areas.

I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.

Native Americans' families experience living surrounded, living in increasingly small reservations surrounded by the society that destroyed their civilization, and are still stigmatized. For decades and decades, for hundreds of years except in Indian schools, they weren't allowed to speak their language. That stigma takes a terrible toll.

William the Conqueror had so great an abhorrence of the English language, that he commanded all the laws and law-proceedings to be in French; and even the children in school were taught the first elements of grammar and letters in French and not in English.

In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.

My mum made a conscious decision not to teach me any Indian languages so I wouldn't talk with an accent.

We're persecuted in the most civilized languages.

We Irish had the right word on the tip of our tongue, but the imperialist got at that. What should trip off it we trip over.

Dictionary: a malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic

The nationalist movement supported Sinhala by suppressing Tamil; there were competing nationalisms. It was a fundamental mistake to make parallel streams in education - or a calculated political gamble. Politicians were playing with it.

Among the worst examples is that of the Alberni Indian Residential School (British Columbia) where, during the 1920s, children caught talking Indian suffered the hideous ordeal of having sewing needles pushed through their tongues.

When I was young we weren't even allowed to speak our own languages in school. They called it 'vernacular,' as if only English was the real tongue.

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.