A Quote by Mother Teresa

I learnt to sing in Bengali, my mother tongue, then went on to sing in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Gujarati and every possible Indian language.

As I am a Bengali and am used to conversing in Bengali and English, I thought my Hindi would show an accent.

I am very comfortable doing Bengali films because it's my mother tongue, which enables me to emote well, and my home is there too.

Whenever I get married, it will be a Bengali wedding. If I won't have a Bengali wedding, my mother won't come. She has warned me. So, I am going to have a Bengali wedding for sure.

I don't know Bengali perfectly. I don't know how to write it or even read it. I have an accent, I speak without authority, and so I've always perceived a disjunction between it and me. As a result, I consider my mother tongue, paradoxically, a foreign language.

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor

I think English is a fantastic, rich and musical language, but of course your mother tongue is the most important for an actor.

Being a Bengali, I have kept in touch with the cinema of my mother tongue.

English was my fourth language. I arrived, I enrolled in public school, as a child, I believe I was about six years old when we finally landed in Michigan. And I was initially put in special education because I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the English language because I was listening to Hungarian and Albanian and German. My mind broke down like I couldn't quite wrap my mind around the fourth language.

Yet some of my friends tell me they understand 50 percent of what my mother says. Some say they understand 80 to 90 percent. Some say they understand none of it, as if she were speaking pure Chinese. But to me, my mother's English is perfectly clear, perfectly natural. It's my mother tongue. Her language, as I hear it, is vivid, direct, full of observation and imagery. That was the language that helped shape the way I saw things, expressed things, made sense of the world

If I were really fluent and born into the English language, I would probably become a greater writer.

I am happy to do a film in Bengali language as I know and love that language.

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.

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.

In a small village near Calcutta, in 1998, a villager who could not speak English sang me What Did You Learn In School Today? in Bengali! Tom Paxton’s songs are reaching around the world more than he is, or any of us could have realized. Keep on, Tom!

I have introduced my daughter to the literary classics and landmark Bengali films. I want her to be well-versed in English but not at the cost of Bengali.