Elif Batuman Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• One of my favorite literary theorists, Mikhail Bakhtin, wrote that the defining characteristic of the novel is its unprecedented level of "heteroglossia" - the way it brings together so many different registers of language. He doesn't mean national languages, but rather the sublanguages we all navigate between every day: high language, low language, everything. I think there's something really powerful about the idea of the novel as a space that can bring all these languages together - not just aggregate them, like the Internet is so good at doing, but bring them into a dialogue.

  Elif Batuman

  Powerful, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Everyone is used to speaking a slightly different "language" with their parents than with their peers, because spoken language changes every generation - like they say, the past is a foreign country - but I think this is intensified for children whose parents also grew up in a geographically foreign country.

  Elif Batuman

  Country, Children, Past

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it's always evolving - clarity of expression is always evolving.

  Elif Batuman

  Communication, Writing, School

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• There are ideas it will be easy to say in the future that we just don't have the language for now.

  Elif Batuman

  Ideas, Language, Easy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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