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" 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
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using. "
David Crystal
Well
Matter
Vocabulary
" 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
" In Cardiff, I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi. This pattern is repeating itself in many urban communities across the U.K.; people are especially keen to develop a strong sense of local identity. "
David Crystal
Identity
Sense
People
" 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. "
David Crystal
See
Influence
Language
" 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
" 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
" Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument. "
David Crystal
Strength
Thinking
Argument
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving. "
David Crystal
Evolving
Me
Language
" 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
" 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
" Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet. "
David Crystal
Show
Language
Internet
" 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 feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread. "
David Crystal
Different
Other
Makes
" 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
" 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
" Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood. "
David Crystal
Enjoy
Rules
Need
" 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
" 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
" 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