Trevor Noah Quotes About Language
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If you look at this election, I feel like Donald Trump was speaking a different language to Hillary Clinton.
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[Languages] became a tool that served me my whole life.
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Language and accents govern so much of how people think about other people.
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I speak English, obviously, Afrikaans, which is a derivative of Dutch that we have in South Africa. And then I speak African languages. So I speak Zulu. I speak Xhosa. I speak Tswana. And I speak Tsonga. And like - so those are my languages of the core. And then I don't claim German, but I can have a conversation in it. So I'm trying to make that officially my seventh language. And then, hopefully, I can learn Spanish.
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Living with my mom, I saw how she used language to cross boundaries, handle situations, navigate the world.
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I learned to use language like my mother did. I would simulcast, give you the program in your own tongue.
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I think it was something I inherited from my mother, who learned to do it. You know, I, like a baby duckling, was merely mimicking the survival traits that my mother possessed. And I came to learn very quickly that language was a powerful, powerful tool.
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When you hear somebody speaking in an accent, it's almost like they're invading your language while they're speaking to you because if you hear someone speak another language, you almost don't care. But when they speak your language with an accent, it feels like an invasion of something that belongs to you. And, immediately, we change.
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I'd get suspicious looks from people just walking down the streets. Where are you from? They'd ask. I'd reply in whatever language they'd addressed me in using the same accent that they used. There would be a brief moment of confusion, and then the suspicious look would disappear.
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Smaller incidents in my life made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.
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