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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices. "

" You don't usually get a compound word where the first part is a slang thing and the second part is a rather ordinary or formal thing - they don't usually mix - but 'gobsmacked' is a perfect exception to that rule. "

" What turns teenagers on more than the Internet these days? If you can get a language out there, the youngsters are much more likely to think it's cool. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving. "

David Crystal

Evolving

Language

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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

" The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities. "

" At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. "

" Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster. "

" Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it. "

David Crystal

Issues

Language

" You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "