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" A community, once it realises that its language is in danger, can get its act together and introduce measures which can genuinely revitalise. You've seen it happen in Australia with several Aboriginal languages. And it's happening in other countries, too. "

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" Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible. "

David Crystal

Message

Phone

Mobile

" Bilingualism lets you have your cake and eat it. The new language opens the doors to the best jobs in society; the old language allows you to keep your sense of 'who you are.' It preserves your identity. With two languages, you have the best of both worlds. "

" How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps. "

" It's very difficult to find even one or two criteria that you will find in every Internet situation, and the reason is that the technology constrains language in individual ways. "

" In Cardiff, I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi. This pattern is repeating itself in many urban communities across the U.K.; people are especially keen to develop a strong sense of local identity. "

" Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using. "

" Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like. "

" Over the last 50 years or so, we have seen an increasing cultural diversification across the country. Accents are a reflection of society, and as society changes, so accents change. "

" Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us. "

" Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next. "

" The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before. "

" At the same time we overlap, because, I do linguistics, and Ben did a first degree in Linguistics at Lancaster University, so he knows some of my subject. "

" Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. "

" It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project. "

" It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows. "

" Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument. "

" Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state. "

David Crystal

World

People

" I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity - they form part of the linguistic color of a period. "

" People are very ready to criticize other people's accents. There's no correlation between accents and intelligence or accents and criminality, but people do make judgments. "

" One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status. "

" Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people's anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language. "

" The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography. "

" The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past. "

" Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet. "

" There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower. "

" The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies. "

" Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly. "

David Crystal

Language

Internet

" As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear. "

" English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach. "

" The one thing about internet language, people join it, and what quickly evolves is an 'internet dialect,' as it were. "