David Crystal Quotes

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David Crystal

Profession : Educator

Birth : July 6, 1941

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

David Crystal

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

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

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

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

David Crystal

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

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

David Crystal

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

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

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.

David Crystal

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

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

It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows.

David Crystal

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

David Crystal

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

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

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

David Crystal

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

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

David Crystal

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