{"quotes":[{"text":"The joy of knowing a foreign language is inexpressible. I find it really difficult to express such joy in my mother tongue.","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["express","foreign","foreign-language","foreigners","inexpressible","joy","know","knowing","language","language-barrier","language-learning","language-understanding","languages","learn-language","learning","mother-language","mother-tongue","understanding"],"id":22528,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"The writing style which is most natural for you is bound to echo the speech you heard when a child. English was the novelist Joseph Conrad's third language, and much of that seems piquant in his use of English was no doubt colored by his first language, which was Polish. And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. I myself grew up in Indianapolis, where common speech sounds like a band saw cutting galvanized tin, and employs a vocabulary as unornamental as a monkey wrench.In some of the more remote hollows of Appalachia, children still grow up hearing songs and locutions of Elizabethan times. Yes, and many Americans grow up hearing a language other than English, or an English dialect a majority of Americans cannot understand.All these varieties of speech are beautiful, just as the varieties of butterflies are beautiful. No matter what your first language, you should treasure it all your life. If it happens not to be standard English, and if it shows itself when you write standard English, the result is usually delightful, like a very pretty girl with one eye that is green and one that is blue.I myself find that I trust my own writing most, and others seem to trust it most, too, when I sound most like a person from Indianapolis, which is what I am. What alternatives do I have? The one most vehemently recommended by teachers has no doubt been pressed on you, as well: to write like cultivated Englishmen of a century or more ago.","author":"Kurt Vonnegut Jr.","tags":["dialect","first-language","irish","joseph-conrad","language","mother-tongue","polish","prose","trust","writing","writing-style"],"id":38759,"author_id":"Kurt+Vonnegut+Jr."},{"text":"It's okay to be proud of your good English. But don't be proud of being poor at your Mother tongue. Only the scum of the earth do that.","author":"Manasa Rao","tags":["english","insult","mother-tongue","pride"],"id":155197,"author_id":"Manasa+Rao"},{"text":"These Cro-Magnon people were identical to us: they had the same physique, the same brain, the same looks. And, unlike all previous hominids who roamed the earth, they could choke on food. That may seem a trifling point, but the slight evolutionary change that pushed man's larynx deeper into his throat, and thus made choking a possibility, also brought with it the possibility of sophisticated, well articulated speech. Other mammals have no contact between their air passages and oesophagi. They can breathe and swallow at the same time, and there is no possibility of food going down the wrong way. But with Homo sapiens food and drink must pass over the larynx on the way to the gullet and thus there is a constant risk that some will be inadvertently inhaled. In modern humans, the lowered larynx isn't in position from birth. It descends sometime between the ages of three and five months - curiously, the precise period when babies are likely to suffer from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. At all events, the descended larynx explains why you can speak and your dog cannot.","author":"Bill Bryson","tags":["animals","bill-bryson","cro-magnon","language","mammals","mother-tongue"],"id":174173,"author_id":"Bill+Bryson"},{"text":"Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.","author":"Amit Chaudhuri","tags":["class","culture","history","language","mother-tongue"],"id":200242,"author_id":"Amit+Chaudhuri"},{"text":"Facing a language you don't know is like returning to your infancy when your mother tongue used to be a foreign language to you.","author":"Munia Khan","tags":["facing-challenges","foreign","foreign-language","infancy","infant","language","language-barrier","language-learning","language-understanding","learn","learning","mother-tongue","mothertongue","return","returning"],"id":241860,"author_id":"Munia+Khan"},{"text":"She sat, rediscovering the fullness of her first tongue in one long submersion. Again and again she would pause on a word Melio uttered. She would roll it around in her mind, feeling the contours of it. At times her mouth gaped open, her lips moving as if she were drinking in his words instead of breathing.","author":"David Anthony Durham","tags":["language","mother-tongue"],"id":286339,"author_id":"David+Anthony+Durham"},{"text":"My tongue was handed down to meby datus and katipuneros. The truth ismy mouth is a battlefield thatyou wouldn’t know how to fight in.","author":"Danabelle Gutierrez","tags":["filipino","heritage","language","love","mother-tongue","pinay","quote","tagalog"],"id":442716,"author_id":"Danabelle+Gutierrez"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":8,"pages":1}}