Speak Not Quotes

“A ‘Movement for a Phonetic Alphabet’ began lobbying for just that,38 and in 1898 the Guangxu Emperor even gave his imprimatur to a phoneticization scheme developed by Lu Kan-chang, which would have supplemented Chinese characters with an alphabet partially based on Roman characters, and could be used for multiple Chinese languages and dialects.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“It cannot be overstated how close Hawaiian came to extinction. Many of the immersion preschools had to bring in elderly people to act as teachers, as so few in the intervening generation spoke the language. Had the Hawaiian renaissance come a decade later, many of these people would have been dead, and the process might have been closer to reviving an extinct language than revitalizing one under threat, a far, far harder task.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“It cannot be overstated how close Hawaiian came to extinction. Many of the immersion preschools had to bring in elderly people to act as teachers, as so few in the intervening generation spoke the language.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“In 1999, for the first time in over a century, a class of students educated entirely in Hawaiian from the age of four to eighteen graduated,”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“In 1984, the first Hawaiian immersion kindergarten had opened on Kaua’i, and more began popping up throughout the islands.19 Two years later, a bill allowing Hawaiian to be used as a medium of instruction in public schools passed,”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“We feel Wales should get independence from normal political channels but by the time she does the only people left to celebrate will be Liverpudlians’.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language

“Is the position hopeless? It is, of course, if we are content to give up hope. There is nothing in the world more comfortable than to give up hope. For then one can go on to enjoy life.”
― James Griffiths, Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language