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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

David Crystal

Issues

Language

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