"It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning, which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist"
About this Quote
The line “local overtones of meaning” does the real work. Sapir isn’t talking about vocabulary gaps you can patch with new words. He means the connotations, social cues, jokes, insults, and inherited metaphors that give speech its tribal charge. An “international language” can deliver transactions; it can’t easily deliver belonging. That’s why he frames these overtones as “dear to the heart of the nationalist”: nationalism feeds on the thick, untranslatable residue of culture, the stuff that marks insiders and keeps outsiders slightly off-balance. A shared auxiliary language threatens that advantage by flattening nuance and weakening the emotional leverage of “our way of speaking.”
Calling it “hopeless” is less defeatist than diagnostic. Sapir is warning that the obstacle isn’t linguistic engineering but political psychology. People don’t cling to linguistic quirks despite their inefficiency; they cling to them because inefficiency is often the point. The subtext: if you want international communication, you’ll get further by accepting multilingualism and translation than by pretending you can build a frictionless tongue that leaves nationalist attachments untouched.
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Sapir, Edward. (2026, February 19). It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning, which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-would-of-course-be-hopeless-to-attempt-to-47703/
Chicago Style
Sapir, Edward. "It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning, which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist." FixQuotes. February 19, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-would-of-course-be-hopeless-to-attempt-to-47703/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"It would, of course, be hopeless to attempt to crowd into an international language all those local overtones of meaning, which are so dear to the heart of the nationalist." FixQuotes, 19 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/it-would-of-course-be-hopeless-to-attempt-to-47703/. Accessed 9 Mar. 2026.
