Linguistic Isolation Quotes

And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

My first year in Japan was very tough, just like my first year in the minors. But at least there I had a lot of Dominican people and Latin people I can talk to. If you don't have anybody to talk to, you can get depressed. But if you find someone who talks your language, it's easier.

The country that I was coming from, the island I was in, hadn't been written about, really. So I thought that I virtually had it all to myself, including the language that was spoken there, which was a French Creole, and a landscape that is not recorded, really, and the people.

I had never thought about what it might mean to be deaf, to be deprived of language, or to have a remarkable language (and community and culture) of one’s own. Up to this point, I had mostly thought and written about the problems of individuals–here I was to encounter an entire community.

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

I am used to being places where I don't speak the language. What I am not used to is being in a part of a country where few people speak my language. Call it ignorance, arrogance, or what have you, but most places I have visited, I was lucky enough to be able to get by with English.

It’s daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of responsibility when the language is incomprehensible.

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.

It's fascinating when you're from another place, but you don't speak the language.

I was my mother's translator until I was probably 12 years old, and I remember how people looked at her.

I want to go to a country where I don't speak the language. I want to be lost in translation.