Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before. "
David Crystal
Influence
Internet
People
Related Quotes:
" 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. "
David Crystal
Irish
Name
Respect
" Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet. "
David Crystal
Show
Language
Internet
" 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. "
David Crystal
Devil
Thought
Technology
" 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. "
David Crystal
Internet
Language
Look
" 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. "
David Crystal
Control
Focus
People
" 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
" 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. "
David Crystal
Short
Internet
Communication
" 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. "
David Crystal
Who
Death
Language
" 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. "
David Crystal
Dying
Past
Today
" 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. "
David Crystal
Community
Act
You
" 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. "
David Crystal
People
You
Look
" 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.' "
David Crystal
Focus
Ignore
Language
" Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument. "
David Crystal
Strength
Thinking
Argument
" The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before. "
David Crystal
Internet
Way
Voice
" The one thing about internet language, people join it, and what quickly evolves is an 'internet dialect,' as it were. "
David Crystal
About
People
Join
" There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower. "
David Crystal
Thing
Accent
Flower
" 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. "
David Crystal
Identity
History
World
" 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. "
David Crystal
Group
You
Own
" 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. "
David Crystal
First
Degree
Same
" 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
Like
World
People
" 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. "
David Crystal
Universal
Who
Way
" At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects. "
David Crystal
Kaleidoscope
Time
Language
" Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly. "
David Crystal
Up
Language
Internet
" It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows. "
David Crystal
Think
Problem
Been
" 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. "
David Crystal
You
Words
New
" 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. "
David Crystal
You
Time
Talk
" 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. "
David Crystal
Understanding
Why
Generation
" 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. "
David Crystal
Language
Past
New
" 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. "
David Crystal
Perfect
First
Word
" 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. "
David Crystal
Three
Together
Years