Words matter. These are the best David Crystal Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.
Academics don’t normally manage to alter people’s way of thinking through their strength of argument.
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.
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.’
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.
The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries – eventually – reflect popular choices.
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.
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.
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn’t linguistically sensible.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
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.
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.
Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
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.
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.
‘Spell it Out’ rose to be number 4 on the best-selling Amazon chart – ahead of ‘Fifty Shades of Grey!’ Who ever would have thought that spelling would one day beat sex – even if it was for only a few hours!
As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.
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.
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.
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
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.
You can say now, ‘I dissed him’ – to diss, I dissed him – or, ‘Stop dissing her’. And that’s the interesting thing, that it’s the prefix that’s become the verb! It’s a most remarkable development.
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.
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.
English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.
There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there’s no such thing as an ugly flower.
One notable feature is that English doesn’t have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
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.
