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" It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research. "

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" The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now. "

David Crystal

Back

Language

Nobody

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

" Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before. "

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

" 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. "

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

David Crystal

Issues

Language

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale. "

" We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "