Top 38 Quotes About Language And Identity
#1. Language and identity are so fundamentally intertwined. You peel back all the layers in terms of what we wear and what we eat and all the things that mark us, and in the end, what we have are our words.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#2. Du hast so viele Leben, wie du Sprachen sprichst. (You have as many lives as the number of languages you speak.)
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#3. The language we share is at the core of our identity as citizens, and our ticket to full participation in American political life. We can speak any language we want at the dinner table, but English is the language of public discourse, or the marketplace and of the voting booth.
S.I. Hayakawa
#4. Corporate identity specialists spend their time rechristening other companies, conducting a legal search and a linguistic search to insure that the name is not an insult in another language.
Lisa Belkin
#5. It was an identity crisis. I was born and raised in France, but I never really felt French, so I needed to find something that I was more connected to. I used to go back to Tunisia every summer, but I was more into the language, my Arabic roots.
EL Seed
#6. He said that if culture is a house, then language was the key to the front door; to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
Khaled Hosseini
#7. Maybe this man experiences another kind of reality where he is here and there, before and after, and he moves from one to the other shatteringly, in a state of collapse, minus an identity, a language, a way to enjoy the savor of the honey-coated toast she watches him eat. She
Don DeLillo
#8. I've been working a lot with identity and roots, being part of your roots. I went into this topic where I was trying to break the stereotype of Arabic language. The non-translation work, this is where I make the switch, where you don't need to translate.
EL Seed
#9. Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.
Helder Camara
#10. The language of literature is the language of all the world. It is necessary to divest ourselves at once of the notion of diversified vocal and grammatical speech which constitutes the various tongues of the Earth, and conceals the identity of image and logic in the minds of all men.
George Edward Woodberry
#11. When you get into the third or fourth generation of Latino immigrants to the United States, you see the kids speaking more English than Spanish, and it's important that we don't lose our identity, our language.
Thalia
#12. The Scots language is a mark of the distinctive identity of the Scottish people; and as such we should be concerned to preserve it, even if there were no other reason, because it is ours. This statement requires neither explanation nor apology.
J.Derrick McClure
#13. Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.
John McGahern
#14. We can think of solutions in various theoretical ways, but it's not so on the ground. If they don't have a reference that helps them to belong, then they will end up excluding, and through that they get to feel that they belong on the basis of some narrow identity, language or color.
Tariq Ramadan
#15. I am starting to talk fast now, and I have to remember to slow down because when I get excited, I start to sound like myself and my American accent goes away.
NoViolet Bulawayo
#16. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, "I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being." That
Trevor Noah
#17. The relation of photography and language is a principal site of struggle for value and power in contemporary representations of reality; it is the place where images and words find and lose their conscience, their aesthetic and ethical identity.
William J. Mitchell
#18. My mother's journals are a shadow play with mine. I am a woman wedded to words. Words cast a shadow. Without a shadow there is no depth. Without a shadow there is no substance. If we have no shadow, it means we are invisible. As long as I have a shadow, I am alive.
Terry Tempest Williams
#19. We're afraid the others will think we're agringadas because we don't speak Chicano Spanish. We oppress each other trying to out-Chicano each other, vying to be "real" Chicanas, to speak like Chicanos. There is no one Chicano language just as there is no one Chicano experience.
Gloria E. Anzaldua
#20. Bound by a common identity grounded in language and history, the Arabs are all the more fascinating for their diversity. They are one people and many peoples at the same time.
Eugene Rogan
#21. Having God as an identity marker is nothing but a label, a language, and a lifestyle. I'm a Christian. I talk like one. I act like one.
But having God as an identity changer is so much more. It's lavish abandon to who God is and who He's made me to be. Holding nothing back!
Lysa TerKeurst
#22. Neurology's favourite word is 'deficit', denoting an impairment or incapacity of neurological function: loss of speech, loss of language, loss of memory, loss of vision, loss of dexterity, loss of identity and myriad other lacks and losses of specific functions (or faculties).
Oliver Sacks
#23. Arguments about language are usually arguments about politics, disguised and channeled through one of our most distinctive markers of identity.
Robert Lane Greene
#24. I do not call the sod under my feet my country; but language-religion-government-blood-identity in these makes men of one country.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#25. Language, identity, place, home: these are all of a piece - just different elements of belonging and not-belonging.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#26. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human condition. Writers are either polluters or part of the cleanup.
Mary Pipher
#27. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
A.S. Byatt
#28. One's identity derives not from one's nation or blood but from the language one uses.
Minae Mizumura
#29. The fact of simultaneously being Christian and having as my mother tongue Arabic, the holy language of Islam, is one of the basic paradoxes that have shaped my identity.
Amin Maalouf
#30. To make a name in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves. We either get our name - our defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness - from what God has done for us and in us (Revelation 2:17), or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves.
Timothy Keller
#31. Any opinion writer worth his salt would have rejected the quaint notion that certain eternally aggrieved identity groups have exclusive linguistic rights to words in the English language.
Ilana Mercer
#32. Language, identity and forms of life are the terms in which political demands are shaped and voiced.
Terry Eagleton
#33. Greenberg wanted to give his pilots an alternate identity. Their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural legacy. They needed an opportunity to step outside those roles ... and language was the key to that transformation.
Malcolm Gladwell
#34. As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.
Charlie Pierce
#35. Our first experience of life is primarily felt in the *body.* ... We know ourselves in the security of those who hold us and gaze upon us. It's not heard or seen or thought it's felt. That's the original knowing.
Richard Rohr
#36. I never said to myself, I am longing; that feeling lived at a level below language.
Lauren Slater
#37. Tell me how much a nation knows about its own language, and I will tell you how much that nation knows about its own identity.
John Ciardi
