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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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

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

" The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

David Crystal

Issues

Language

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "