Chinua Achebe Quotes About Language

Quotes about: Language

• I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.

  Chinua Achebe

  Home, Weight, Able

  "Chinua Achebe: A life in writing" by Nicholas Wroe, www.theguardian.com. December 13, 2010.

• But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

  Chinua Achebe

  Beautiful, Passion, Heart

• There is something about important stories that is not just the message, but also the way that message is conveyed, the arrangement of the words, the felicity of the language. So it's really a balance between your commitment, whether it's political or economic or whatever, and your craft as an artist.

  Chinua Achebe

  Commitment, Artist, Political

  "Rip Chinua Achebe (1930 - 2013)" by Lisa Dusenbery, therumpus.net. March 22, 2013.

• The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. The African writer should aim to use English in a way that brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.

  Chinua Achebe

  Different, Peculiar, Use

• Unless I'm writing in the Igbo language, I use a language developed elsewhere, which is English. That affects the way I write. It even affects to some extent the stories I write.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Stories, Use

• The language of young men is pull down and destroy; but an old man speaks of conciliation.

  Chinua Achebe

  Men, Thought Provoking, Down And

  Chinua Achebe (1986). “Arrow of God”, p.153, Heinemann

• The ordinary Nigerians have lived as neighbors down the millennia. I was talking about the British who came and merged a whole number of mini states and big states into one unit. But those people were always there, and they always managed to live side by side with their neighbours. So they were not owned or run by one kingdom. It was not practically impossible for these people when they have different languages and religions to be neighbors. So it is that habit of neighbourliness which is destroyed and put under great strain again and again when you have things like massacres.

  Chinua Achebe

  Running, Talking, Numbers

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• I think the language that we use in dealing with one another is very important. And even if I am called upon to bring out some money to support a regime, and I am entitled to say I do not like what that regime does and obviously I am not going to put money there - you cannot really say this is wrong or this is unreasonable.

  Chinua Achebe

  Thinking, Support, Important

• The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use.

  Chinua Achebe

  Different, Use, World

• If I say look unless you change your leaders I will not give you any aid, you are likely to have people who say: "To the hell with you, we will struggle on the way but we will do it". Therefore what I am saying is - and I do not whether it is coming through clearly - there has to be a lot of care exercised by the people who are in the position to give or withhold assistance: if they start throwing their weight around, using extreme language, seeming to order other nations to do their bidding, then there will not be a good result, it will not be done.

  Chinua Achebe

  Struggle, Order, Giving

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• We must now turn from considering the necessary struggle with language arising, as it were, from its very nature and the nature of the society it serves to the more ominous threat to its integrity brought about neither by its innate inadequacy nor yet by the incompetence and carelessness of its ordinary users, but rather engineered deliberately by those who will manipulate words for their own ends.

  Chinua Achebe

  Integrity, Struggle, Ordinary

  Chinua Achebe (2012). “Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays”, p.169, Penguin

• It is not quite true to say that I am not an advocate of writing in African languages. What I think is, one has to think about what is practicable.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Thinking, Language

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• It is as though the ancestors who made language and knew from what bestiality its use rescued them are saying to us: Beware of interfering with its purpose! For when language is seriously interfered with, when it is disjoined from truth, be it from mere incompetence or worse, from malice, horrors can descend again on mankind.

  Chinua Achebe

  Purpose, Use, Language

  FaceBook post by Chinua Achebe from Jul 15, 2015

• I think that is one of the first things that I got clear in my mind when I began to play around with fiction, that I had to find a language and it was not in existance at the time. You have put it very well - it wasn't to be taken for granted. You had to go on and search until you found a way through the conversation of English and Igbo. The two languages stuck into each other and tried to find a way to express through one, the medium of the thoughts. That's a very exciting thing to do, a very difficult thing to do.

  Chinua Achebe

  Taken, Thinking, Play

  Source: www.ehlingmedia.com

• If someone said, I want to translate your novel into Igbo, I would say, Go ahead. But when I write in the Igbo language, I write my own dialect. I write some poetry in that dialect.

  Chinua Achebe

  Writing, Dialect, Want

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