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" As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear. "
David Crystal
Know
You
King
Related Quotes:
" Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument. "
David Crystal
Strength
Thinking
Argument
" There's an old little jingle: 'The chief use of slang is to show that you're one of the gang.' What that means is that every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there's a group of lawyers, they have their own slang. If there's a group of doctors, they have their own slang, and so on. "
David Crystal
Group
You
Own
" 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. "
David Crystal
Intelligence
Other
Make
" Increasingly, over the past ten years, I've come to take the view that a cultural perspective is intrinsic to the future of language teaching and learning, especially in the case of English, as it becomes increasingly global. "
David Crystal
Future
Perspective
Learning
" One of the places the full stop is really being revised in a really fundamental way is on the Internet. You look at the Internet or any instant messaging exchange - anything that is a fast dialogue taking place. People simply do not put full stops in unless they want to make a point. "
David Crystal
People
You
Look
" 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. "
David Crystal
Language
Past
New
" Of all the mediums that influence language, I think film is the one that has the most effect. Not so much from the point of view of pronunciation and grammar. I don't think we pick up very many sounds and grammatical instructions from the films we see - but the catchphrases. "
David Crystal
See
Influence
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. "
David Crystal
Story
Permanent
Left
" You can say now, 'I dissed him' - to diss, I dissed him - or, 'Stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development. "
David Crystal
You
Development
Interesting
" One of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend - and a blend is when you run two words together to make a third word. "
David Crystal
You
Words
New
" 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
" 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. "
David Crystal
Language
You
Two
" Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet. "
David Crystal
Show
Language
Internet
" The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before. "
David Crystal
Internet
Way
Voice
" 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. "
David Crystal
End
You
Who
" 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
Like
World
People
" A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread. "
David Crystal
Different
Other
Makes
" English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background. "
David Crystal
History
Renaissance
Meeting
" It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows. "
David Crystal
Think
Problem
Been
" 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. "
David Crystal
Who
Death
Language
" 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. "
David Crystal
Society
Language
Identity
" People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it, you find they're not. "
David Crystal
People
New
Language
" 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. "
David Crystal
First
Degree
Same
" At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. "
David Crystal
Kaleidoscope
Time
Language
" The one thing about internet language, people join it, and what quickly evolves is an 'internet dialect,' as it were. "
David Crystal
About
People
Join
" When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no. "
David Crystal
Internet
Language
Look
" 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. "
David Crystal
Identity
History
World
" Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly. "
David Crystal
Up
Language
Internet
" 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. "
David Crystal
Irish
Name
Respect
" One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status. "
David Crystal
Much
Expressing
System