Language
Yolngu speak a dozen dialects of a language group known as Yolngu Matha. English can be anywhere from a third to a tenth language for Yolŋu.
Read more about this topic: Yolngu People
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Syntax and vocabulary are overwhelming constraints—the rules that run us. Language is using us to talk—we think we’re using the language, but language is doing the thinking, we’re its slavish agents.”
—Harry Mathews (b. 1930)
“It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into palaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)