Bilingualism Quotes

“Overly literal translations, far from being faithful, actually distort meaning by obscuring sense.”
― Ken Liu, The Three-Body Problem

“Expansion History, and you came to the description of the triple sunrises you can see when you're hanging in Lsel Station's Lagrange point, and you thought, At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren't even in my language―>
Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper.

We felt that way.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Can you read?" the boy said at last.
"Of course," said Arrietty. "Can't you?"
"No," he stammered. "I mean--yes. I mean I've just come from India."
"What's that got to do with it?" asked Arrietty.
"Well, if you're born in India, you're bilingual. And if you're bilingual, you can't read. Not so well."
Arrietty stared up at him: what a monster, she thought, dark against the sky.
"Do you grow out of it?" she asked.
He moved a little and she felt the cold flick of his shadow.
"Oh yes," head said, "it wears off. My sisters were bilingual; now they aren't a bit. They could read any of those books upstairs in the schoolroom."
"So could I," said Arrietty quickly, "if someone could hold them, and turn the pages. I'm not a bit bilingual. I can read anything.”
― Mary Norton, Borrowers

“Speaking two languages may seem a relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment even though your body can be in one place at a time. When I return to Urdu, I feel shocked at my own neglect of a space so intimate to me: like relearning the proportions of a once-familiar room, it takes me by surprise to recollect that I need not feel grief, I can eat grief; that I need not bury my mother but instead can offer her into the earth, for I am in Urdu now.”
― Sara Suleri, Meatless Days

“In most black people, there is a South Side, a sense of home, that never leaves, and yet to compete in the world, we have to go forth. So we learn to code-switch and become bilingual. We save our Timberlands for the weekend, and our jokes for the cats in the mail room. Some of us give ourselves up completely and become the mask, while others overcompensate and turn every dustup into the Montgomery bus boycott.
But increasingly, as we move into the mainstream, black folks are taking a third road -- becoming ourselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“My motivation for learning Japanese was to translate a chemical patent, a job that I had heroically (i.e., rashly) taken on.”
― Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages

“At first, we should read with a blitheness practically bordering on superficiality; later on, with a conscientiousness close to distrust.”
― Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages

“Language is present in a piece of writing like the sea in a single drop.”
― Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages

“The truth is that bilingual babies are like machines.”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“Learning another language is not only learning how to do things with different words, but also learning how to do things in different world.”
― Wahyu Razak

“To look it at another way, surely there are many unfortunate people who have needed to undergo multiple stomach surgeries. Yet no one would hand a scalpel over to them and ask them to perform the same surgery they received on another person, simply because they themselves had undergone it so often.”
― Kató Lomb, Polyglot: How I Learn Languages

“Les langues ne sont pas seulement des langues : ce sont aussi des world views, c’est à dire des façons de voir et de comprendre le monde. Il y a de l’intraduisible là-dedans... et si vous avez plus d’une world view... vous n’en avez, d’une certaine façon, aucune.”
― Nancy Huston, Nord Perdu, suivi de Douze France

“Language, as much as land, is a place. To be cut off from it is to be, in a sense, homeless.”
― Lauren Collins, When in French: Love in a Second Language

“Expansion History, and you came to the description of the triple sunrises you can see when you're hanging in Lsel Station's Lagrange point, and you thought, At last, there are words for how I feel, and they aren't even in my language―>
Yes, Mahit says. Yes, she does. That ache: longing and a violent sort of self-hatred, that only made the longing sharper.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Why can't bilingualism be seen as an extra resource? Is it because kids who can think in two languages are smarter?

(from the book Attitude, 2002)”
― Lalo Alcaraz

“I switch cultures like clothes,
I switch sciences like pens.
I switch scriptures like tides,
I switch languages like seasons.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Language is one of the more complex human cognitive functions,” Narly Golestani, Group Leader of the university’s Brain and Language Lab, tells me during a recent visit. “There’s been a lot of work on bilingualism. Interpretation goes one step beyond that because the two languages are active simultaneously. And not just in one modality, because you have perception and production at the same time. So the brain regions involved go to an extremely high level, beyond language"["In other words: inside the lives and minds of real-time translators," Mosaic, November 18, 2014].”
― Geoff Watts

“There is as little likelihood of squeezing an adult into the intellectual framework of their childhood as there is into their first pair of pajamas.”
― Kató Lomb

“we seem to be on a constant quest to keep America a country of citizens who can only talk to one another”
― Kari Martindale

“only boring people get bored.”
― Michelle Vaid, Mr Peter's Adventures In Siracusa, Sicily. - Le Avventure di Peter a Siracusa, Sicilia.

“We know that babies of around nine months old have had sufficient experience with language(s) to show a certain amount of sensitivity to phonotactic rules. We believe this to be true because babies demonstrate a preference for hearing words that contain highly frequent sound sequences in their language rather than less frequent sequences.”
― Albert Costa

“One of the primary jobs for a baby during the first months of learning is to build what we call a sound inventory of the language to which he or she is exposed.”
― Albert Costa, The Bilingual Brain: And What It Tells Us about the Science of Language

“There are those who eagerly learn another language to be one with another culture, then there are those morons who insist on the exclusive glorification of their so-called native language. The world is beautified by the former, whereas the latter only sustain disharmony - the latter only act as a prehistoric impediment to the unification of humankind.”
― Abhijit Naskar, The Gentalist: There's No Social Work, Only Family Work

“Earlier this year, a self-identified White, monolingual English-speaking teacher explained to me that, among other signs of her stupidity, Dr Baez’s English language skills are ‘horrible, and from what I hear, her Spanish isn’t that good either’...If Dr Baez, the bilingual school principal with multiple university degrees, including a doctorate in education, was subjected to such discriminatory thinking, then what could this mean for students, who were positioned in highly subordinate institutional positions?”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“While bilingual is understood as a valuable asset or goal for middle-class and upper-class students, for working-class and poor students it is framed as a disability that must be overcome”
― Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad

“Nick nodded. "My mother said that always surprised her-all the houses made out of wood here, especially in the suburbs. She said growing up in the Soviet Union, it was all concrete and cinder blocks where she lived. Wooden houses were for old Russian fairy tales."
Sawyer reflected, mulling. "Have you ever wanted to go there?"
"Sure. But growing up, I was always told that's was impossible," he said. "At least for me and my mom, given her political history. But it's strange; there were times when I was super aware that she could never bring me back to where she was from, but other times I felt so completely that I have been there in my mind, I forget that I haven't, even now."
"Do you speak Russian?"
"Of course. My mom's English is perfectly fine, but we always wind up speaking in Russian together."
"Do you ever...dream in Russian?"
"I do.”
― Suzanne Rindell, Summer Fridays

“One broken second language is far more valuable than all the mass-produced subtitles.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Speaking more than one language delays age-related cognitive decline.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“I grew up speaking two languages,
mother tongue and national tongue,
then in my late teens I assimilated English
from pirated dvds of American movies;

soon after I absorbed another language,
from the South of India, again from movies.
Years later when I started writing and got WiFi,
that's when an entire new horizon opened up.

This time I found myself drawn to Turkish
and Spanish, which became second languages
in the canon, after my first English.

I don't describe, I embody -
I don't study a culture,
I disappear into the culture.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat