A Quote by George Bernard Shaw
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it.
Related Quotes
The English have no respect for their language, and will not teach their children to speak it. They spell it so abominably that no man can teach himself what it soundslike.It isimpossible foran Englishmanto openhis mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him.
Plainly, children learn their language. I don't speak Swahili. And it cannot be that my language is 'an innate property of our brain.' Otherwise I would have been genetically programmed to speak (some variety of) English.
You can't be an American if you don't speak English. Our public schools should be mandated to teach all children in English.
There even are places where English completely disappears. In America, they haven't used it for years! Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
I have a funny relationship to language. When I came to California when I was three I spoke Urdu fluently and I didn't speak a word of English. Within a few months I lost all my Urdu and spoke only English and then I learned Urdu all over again when I was nine. Urdu is my first language but it's not as good as my English and it's sort of become my third language. English is my best language but was the second language I learned.
You only have to look at London, where almost half of all primary school children speak English as a second language, to see the challenges we now face as a country. This isn't fair to anyone: how can people build relationships with their neighbours if they can't even speak the same language?
English has always been my musical language. When I started writing songs when I was 13 or 14, I started writing in English because it's the language in between. I speak Finnish, I speak French, so I'll write songs in English because that's the music I listen to. I learned so much poetry and the poetic way of expressing myself is in English.
Even though many Indians can read or speak English, for most, it is not their first language. At the office, we speak in English, but we consume our culture in our own language.
Why can't the English teach their children how to speak?
Most English speakers do not have the writer's short fuse about seeing or hearing their language brutalized. This is the main reason, I suspect, that English is becoming the world's universal tongue: English-speaking natives don't care how badly others speak English as long as they speak it. French, once considered likely to become the world's lingua franca, has lost popularity because those who are born speaking it reject this liberal attitude and become depressed, insulted or insufferable when their language is ill used.
My mother always spoke to me in English, so it's technically my maternal language, and it became a kind of private language - I was happy that I could speak in English to my mum and the majority of people wouldn't understand it.
Wherever I go, I have to speak English, which is my second language. So whenever you get a chance to speak in your own language? It feels good.
When you go to school in Holland you learn to speak English and write in English - but English is different from the Scottish language!
In some countries, of course, Spanish is the language spoken in public. But for many American children whose families speak Spanish at home, it becomes a private language. They use it to keep the English-speaking world at bay.
There is always that age-old thing about England and America being divided by a common language. You think that because we speak English and you speak English that you're bound to understand and like everything that we do. And of course you don't.
English is a forgiving language. It's not like Classical Arabic and it's not like French. You can speak broken English and be expressive and no one will hold it against you.
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