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" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
" Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible. "
David Crystal
Message
Phone
Mobile
" 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
" Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it. "
David Crystal
Issues
Language
Up
" 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. "
David Crystal
Writing
Generation
Language
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Crystal
You
Development
Interesting
" A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread. "
David Crystal
Different
Other
Makes
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Crystal
End
You
Who
" 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. "
David Crystal
Society
Language
Identity
" Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. "
David Crystal
Enjoy
Rules
Need
" 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. "
David Crystal
Story
Permanent
Left
" As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear. "
David Crystal
Know
You
King
" 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. "
David Crystal
Research
Know
People
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Crystal
History
Renaissance
Meeting
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
David Crystal
Future
Perspective
Learning
" 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. "
David Crystal
People
New
Language
" 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. "
David Crystal
Internet
Language
Think
" 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
" 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
" 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