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" 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. "

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

David Crystal

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" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent. "

" 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. "

" Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.' "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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