Quotes from David Crystal

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

Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet.

Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.

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