Quotes from David Crystal

It's impossible to overestimate the importance of reading aloud in the liturgy of the church. In Catholic Christianity of the time, the 'liturgy of the Word' ranked alongside the 'liturgy of the Eucharist' – as indeed it still does. The

We'll never get them to notice us if we say ordinary things in an ordinary way.

Old attitudes die hard, of course, and there will still be those who mourn the passing of the days when a single accent ruled the British airwaves. But they are a steadily shrinking minority.

The news isn't all positive in relation to regional accents. There are pockets of resistance to the general trend, some quite influential. A report in the Independent (7 March 2017) was headed: Banking jobs denied to young people due to having 'wrong accents

The reality is that accent distinctiveness is nothing to do with physical environment, but a result of the combination of regional and social factors that have influenced the emergence of a particular community.

Of all the mediums that influence language, I think film is the one that has the most effect. Not so much from the point of view of pronunciation and grammar. I don't think we pick up very many sounds and grammatical instructions from the films we see - but the catchphrases.

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.

It's very difficult to find even one or two criteria that you will find in every Internet situation, and the reason is that the technology constrains language in individual ways.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.