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" 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
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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. "
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Devil
Thought
Technology
" Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using. "
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Well
Matter
Vocabulary
" 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. "
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First
Degree
Same
" 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
" 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. "
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Three
Together
Years
" 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
" 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
" 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 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread. "
David Crystal
Different
Other
Makes
" 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
" English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach. "
David Crystal
Reach
History
Other
" 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
" It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research. "
David Crystal
Community
Language
Long
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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 is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower. "
David Crystal
Thing
Accent
Flower
" 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
" Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster. "
David Crystal
Language
Texting
New
" 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
" One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status. "
David Crystal
Much
Expressing
System
" Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument. "
David Crystal
Strength
Thinking
Argument