Quotes from David Crystal

English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.

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

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

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

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

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.

The only languages which do not change are dead ones.

Joke exchanges are carried on in deadly earnest, like a verbal duel-mouth-to-mouth combat. Bang, bang: you're (linguistically) dead.

The story of the English writing system is so intriguing, and the histories behind individual words so fascinating, that anyone who dares to treat spelling as an adventure will find the journey rewarding.

Here is a rewriting of the British national anthem, by 'Camille, Australia'. It is, she explains, chiefly for the benefit of Microsoft Word and Outlook Express users: Gd CTRL-S r gr8sh Qun. Long liv r nobl Qun. Gd CTRL-S the. Qun! ALT-S hr vktrES, HpE & glrES, Lng 2 rain ovR S Gd CTRL-S th. Qun!

There is little scientific data on the point, but evidently people do speak to themselves.

Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.

People sometimes say: 'A picture is worth a thousand words.' That's true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.

This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.

The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It

Intonation is the use of pitch to convey meaning in a language. It has been described as the music or melody of speech.

The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.

Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts - in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.

Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don't travel, you're not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.

Faced with the sentence therapistsneedspecialtreatment we need to know if this is a text about sex crimes or about speech pathology before we can correctly read it aloud.

And there are even more unusual cases in poetry, where the observation that parentheses include content of secondary importance needs to be turned on its head. In a poem, what is within the parentheses is always significant -- often more so than in the surrounding text.

One of his many interests was a concern to establish just how many vowels and consonants the human vocal tract is capable of producing in the languages of the world. The answer is more than people think. He estimated that there were over eight hundred different consonants and some two hundred different vowels.

A leafdi wes mid hire fan biset al abuten, hire lond al destruet, & heo al poure, inwið an eorðene castel.

Information is always being left out, therefore, when speech is written down. And conversely, information is always being added when a written text is spoken aloud.