David Crystal Quotes

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David Crystal

Profession : Educator

Birth : July 6, 1941

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

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

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

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

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

David Crystal

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

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

David Crystal

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

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

David Crystal

Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.

David Crystal

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

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.

David Crystal

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

There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.

David Crystal

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

David Crystal

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

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

David Crystal

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

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

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