Quotes About English Languages

#1. He [P.G.Wodehouse] is I believe, the only man living who speaks with equal fluency the American and English languages.

Max Eastman

#2. Greek is a wonderfully rich and expressive language, which makes it one of the harder of the European tongues to learn. The active vocabulary is much bigger than other European languages. The constructions and the different endings are not easy to master, especially if you are an English speaker.

John Mole

#3. In Canada we have enough to do keeping up with two spoken languages ... so we just go right ahead and use English for literature, Scotch for sermons, and American for conversation.

Stephen Leacock

#4. A man's most vivid emotional and sensuous experience is inevitably bound up with the language that he actually speaks. (New Bearings in English Poetry)

F.R. Leavis

#5. English you're speaking," Matheus said. "The language that sidles up to other languages in dark alleys, mugs them, then rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary. It's the bitch-whore of languages and it owns the world. Suck on that, Rome boy.

Amy Fecteau

#6. It's like there are all these languages available, especially in terms of image. Why confine yourself to only English? There's all these languages and possibilities and concepts to speak or communicate with.

William Wiley

#7. I speak a number of languages, but none are more beautiful to me than English.

Maya Angelou

#8. The Internet took off in English and although there are now fifteen hundred languages on the Internet, seventy percent of it is still in English.

Melvyn Bragg

#9. I can speak English. I can speak Hindi. I can understand one or two other languages.

Azim Premji

#10. For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages.

F. Sionil Jose

#11. These examples of the lack of simplicity in English and French, all appearances to the contrary, could be multiplied almost without limit and apply to all national languages.

Edward Sapir

#12. Because there'd be two languages I couldn't speak, French and English.

Casey Stengel

#13. It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case."

Sydney J. Harris

#14. I actually speak fluent English and Spanish and ... I dabble in a couple of languages, but I'm not fluent in German, Russian and Arabic.

Cote De Pablo

#15. I think they've got 250 languages in Nigeria, and so English is a sort of lingua franca between the 250 languages.

William Golding

#16. In addition to English, at least one ancient language, probably Greek or Hebrew, and two modern languages would be required.

W. H. Auden

#17. In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

William Golding

#18. English is necessary as at present original works of science are in English. I believe that in two decades times original works of science will start coming out in our languages. Then we can move over like the Japanese.

A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

#19. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

James Nicoll

#20. We only speak two languages here: English and profanity.

Kevin Constantine

#21. When I try to write in English, I feel like a bird without wings still trying to fly.

Debasish Mridha

#22. No one who set out to design a form of communication would ever end up with anything like English, Mandarin, or any of the more than six thousand languages spoken today.

Joshua Foer

#23. English loves to stay out all night dancing with other languages, all decked out in sparkling prepositions and irregular verbs. It is unruly and will not obey - just when you think you have it in hand, it lets down its hair along with a hundred nonsensical exceptions.

Catherynne M Valente

#24. I pursue my case, Monsieur, I speak English, Italian and German, and I want justice in all three languages. I have been damaged by unlove. It makes at inappropriate moments when I should be dignified.

Deborah Levy

#25. Here I'd been thinking that just because someone spoke English we'd understand each other. But I guess there are languages within languages, and those can be foreign, too, even when you think you're understanding each other.

Christopher Barzak

#26. My early education was in the public school system of Omaha, where, retrospectively, I realize that my high school training served me in good stead for the basic subjects of mathematics, English, foreign languages and history.

Lawrence R. Klein

#27. A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.

David Crystal

#28. We are from the very middle class family. We have not come from the English medium school. We came from our regional languages school.

Mamata Banerjee

#29. I can fluently speak five languages: English, emoji, sexting, sarcasm and sass.

Tyler Oakley

#30. In the French language, there is a great gulf between prose and poetry; in English, there is hardly any difference. It is a splendid privilege of the great literary languages Greek, Latin, and French that they possess a prose. English has not this privilege. There is no prose in English.

Victor Hugo

#31. Even though I have spent literally years of my life trying to learn another language, any other language - and even though I have in the past claimed in several key professional contexts that I speak other languages - I am in fact still trapped inside the bubble of English.

Lev Grossman

#32. English has always had a special fondness for other European languages, a neighborly soft spot - perhaps because Britain has been invaded by speakers of those languages from the onset of its recorded history.

Rabih Alameddine

#33. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, my wife speaks five languages: Russian, English, French, Italian and, out of self-defense, Spanish. I watched her learn Spanish in three months.

Cheech Marin

#34. The British and Americans are two people separated by a common language.

George Bernard Shaw

#35. There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?

Barbara Ehrenreich

#36. Of all the words in all languages I know, the greatest concentration is in the English word I.

Elias Canetti

#37. You speak English beautifully, which means you can't be English.

Robert Aickman

#38. In English every word can be verbed.

Alan Perlis

#39. As languages go, English is pretty user friendly. If you look at a tiny language spoken somewhere that most of us have never heard of, chances are it's going to be so complicated that you have a hard time imagining how people can walk around speaking it without having a stroke.

John McWhorter

#40. I grew up speaking Spanish and English. My mother can speak Spanish, English, French and Italian, and she's pretty good at faking Portuguese. I wish that I spoke more languages than I do.

Sebastian Arcelus

#41. Modern English is the Wal-Mart of languages: convenient, huge, hard to
avoid, superficially friendly, and devouring all rivals in its eagerness
to expand.

Mark Abley

#42. In 1776, at the point of severance, except for an infusion of words from east coast Indian languages, the English language of North America was not in any radical way dissimilar from that of what the American settlers called the mother country.

Robert Burchfield

#43. Her English was sweet, an effort for her, anachronistic and unpractised.

Ruth Ahmed

#44. In the history of humanity, there have been many languages, including French, that have served as universal languages: Latin, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Yet none of them ever ruled the world the way English does today.

Minae Mizumura

#45. Printing ballots in multiple languages costs millions of dollars every year. It also discourages immigrants from integrating into American society and gaining the benefits that come from speaking English.

Ernest Istook

#46. As a linguist, I don't think of Ada as a big language. Now, English and Japanese, those are big languages. Ada is just a medium-sized language.

Larry Wall

#47. English doesn't borrow from other languages. english follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

James Nicoll

#48. Some men prayed for life and some for death, in languages as varied as their uniforms - the Dutch and Germans and the Scots and French and English tangled side by side, for all men looked alike when they were dying.

Susanna Kearsley

#49. I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I'm ashamed to admit that I still can't read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish.

Joshua Foer

#50. My opinion is that more languages you speak, better it is, but when you come to America, you speak English.

Melania Trump

#51. Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

Maya Angelou

#52. I speak two languages: English and Sarcasm.

Don Rittner

#53. Out here we speak Malspeak, a mangle of English and old languages like Spanish, Mandarin, and Russian. Dialects from a time when the land was defined by many borders. Now there's only one that matters. And I am on the wrong side of it.

Georgia Clark

#54. I never had to learn English, French and German because I was brought up as all three languages. I had a private French teacher before I even went to school. That helped a lot.

Karl Lagerfeld

#55. And Philippe won't speak English. She's sure he can - he's got that European je ne sais quoi that usually means Oh, I speak six languages. And a little Japanese.

Ellen Sussman

#56. I'm used to shifting languages because my father used to speak to us, to my brother and I, he used to speak in English. He wanted us to be quite fluent in English, especially when he was trying to correct our behavior; he would do that in English.

J.M.G. Le Clezio

#57. Back home, almost everything I did, I did in Hebrew. I went to drama school in Hebrew, my whole career was in Hebrew, and to switch languages was something that was fascinating and more complicated than I expected it to be, even though I've been speaking English since I could speak.

Yael Grobglas

#58. I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.

Bill Gates

#59. she likes the sound of languages other than English.

Ken Liu

#60. There's a huge and hungry market for the books on style and fashion in Russia, though the books should be done in Russian, not English since there are few readers who've master foreign languages well enough to buy foreign editions.

Alexander Vassiliev

#61. I speak two languages, Body and English.

Mae West

#62. Today there are about six thousand languages in the world, and half of the world's population speaks only ten of them. English is the single most dominant of these ten.

Christine Kenneally

#63. Sign language is my first language. English and Spanish are my second languages. I learned Spanish from my grandparents, sign language from my parents, and English from television.

Jack Jason

#64. It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed, of many other languages, that we use this same word, "depression" to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide.

Andrew Solomon

#65. Stop being silly, her name is Reshidatu. It is a pity that our official language is English, and a greater pity that our three major languages is the WaZoBia.

S.A. David

#66. Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Louise Erdrich

#67. I will never know what it's like to have only one language in my head. I have the pleasure of being able to move back and forth between Spanish and English, and I incorporate both languages in my books.

Pat Mora

#68. Look, lady I only speak two languages: English and Bad English!

Bruce Willis

#69. I cried in English, I cried in french, I cried in all the languages, because tears are the same all around the world.

Miranda July

#70. Polish has developed unimpeded; someone put their foot out and tripped English. The human grammar is a fecund weed, like grass. Languages like English, Persian, and Mandarin Chinese are mowed lawns, indicative of an interruption in natural proliferation.

John McWhorter

#71. In our generation, everybody told us that it's really important and it's nice to be able to speak a lot of languages. It's an art, too. It really impresses me, people who speak, like, seven languages. I admire them so much, so I began with English, and then Spanish and maybe Portuguese.

Adele Exarchopoulos

#72. In English every word can be verbed. Would that it were so in our programming languages.

Alan Perlis

#73. Older boys were allowed to beat younger ones at my 15th-century English boarding school, and every boy had to run a five-mile annual steeplechase through the sludge and rain of an October day, as horses do. We wrote poems in dead languages and recited the Lord's Prayer in Latin every Sunday night.

Pico Iyer

#74. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget's Thesaurus. "Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist" [The Miracle of Language, page 54].

Bill Bryson

#75. Annoyance has made me bilingual.

Gayle Forman

#76. Whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Sayonards, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians.

Fulcher Of Chartres

#77. I must confess the language of symbols is to me
A Babylonish dialect
Which learned chemists much affect;
It is a party-coloured dress
Of patch'd and piebald languages:
'T is English cut on Greek and Latin,
Like fustian heretofore on satin.

Sir Richard Phillips