Multilingualism Quotes

I wish I had taken Spanish instead of French in high school. I could eavesdrop on a lot more conversations on the subway if I knew Spanish.

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

Her beauty was not in itself quite incomparable, we are told...but conversation with her had an irresistible charm. Her presence, combined with the persuasiveness of her discourse and the character which was somehow diffused about her behavior towards others, had something stimulating about it …. she could readily turn to whatever language she pleased, so that in her interviews with barbarians she seldom had need of an interpreter, but mostly made her replies unaided, whether the men were Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, or Persians.

To have another language is to possess a second soul.

Feliz Navidad' has interfaced the English and Spanish cultures to come together and after all, we're living in a multi-cultural world.

I don't know, 'Zorro' was just so great for me because, knowing where I came from, everyone spoke Spanish to me, like, forever after that. And I'm, like, from Wales.

The President [George W. Bush] speaks Spanish almost as well as he speaks English.

Since I am originally from Hyderabad, I speak Telugu fluently.

Supposedly I've got traces of an English accent, though I can't hear it. I must have inherited it from my mother, who's English, and then I think it was exacerbated by the fact that I live with an Australian.

The fact is I do feel very Spanish, like when I'm talking to my wife and daughter in Spanish at two in the afternoon. I even think in Spanish when I get angry!

My father is from the village of Beranci, Macedonia, and my mother is from Greece.

I speak three languages. I'm pretty handsome myself.

If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

I thought that subtitles are boring because they're there generally to serve us with information to make you understand what people are saying in a different language.

I speak Cantonese, and I speak Tagalog.

My dad came from Cuba when he was a teenager not speaking English. And I grew up here speaking Spanglish. That's the world in which I grew up, and that's a world in which a lot of second generation immigrants find themselves.

When I'm working in America, I wake up with an American accent and stay with it all day till makeup comes off. I just want everyone to be at ease, and not have the show's creators think, 'Oh my god, he's so English, why did we hire him?'

I didn't move to Miami to live in a Spanish-speaking province.

He who knows no foreign languages knows nothing of his own.

Both my parents had heavy accents, and so did everybody they knew. It's a rhythm thing - people who speak English where they have to hesitate and think of the right word. And I think it rubbed off.

I've been dubbing my own lines in Tamil for some time now.

I'm a bit like a chameleon with my accent.

My family comes from Panama, and I grew up in a single parent household with my mother, who barely spoke English. She couldn't get a good job, yet there were four of us for her to raise.

I am an American, but a sense of otherness was part of my growing up. I spoke Norwegian before I spoke English. My mother is Norwegian.