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

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" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread. "

" 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. "