“We know our native language not from dictionaries and grammars but from concrete utterances that we hear and we ourselves reproduce in live speech communication with people around us…This experience can be characterized to some degree as the process of assimilation—more or less creative—of others’ words (and not the words of a language).  Our speech, all our utterances is filled with others’ words, which carry with them their own expression, their own evaluative tone, which we assimilate, rework and re-accentuate.  The utterance is filled with dialogic overtones…after all, our thought itself is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others’ thoughts ” (Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres, 1950s)

“Since I lack a voice of my own, the voices of others invade me as if I were a silent ventriloquist. They ricochet within me, carrying on conversations, lending me their modulations, intonations, rhythms. I do not yet possess them; they possess me. But some of them satisfy a need; some of them stick to my ribs…eventually the voices enter; by assuming them, I gradually make them mine. I am being remade, fragment by fragment, like a patchwork quilt; there are more colors in the world than I ever knew.”(Eva Hoffman 1989:219-20 Lost in Translation. A Life in a New Language)