David Crystal - Language Quotes

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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.

David Crystal
Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks.

David Crystal
Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.

David Crystal
The structural properties of the language are many and complex, but at least they are finite and fairly easy to identify: there are only so many sounds, letters, and grammatical constructions, and although there is a huge vocabulary, at least the units are determinate and manageable.

David Crystal
Micro computers used as word processors complement the audio facilities, enabling the interactive teaching of all four language skills reading, listening, speaking and writing.

David Crystal
The structural closeness of languages to each other has often been thought to be an important factor in FLL (foreign language learning). If the L2 [the foreign language] is structurally similar to the L1 [the original language], it is claimed, learning should be easier than in cases where the L2 is very different. However, it is not possible to correlate linguistic difference and learning difficulty in any straightforward way, and even the basic task of quantifying linguistic difference proves to be highly complex, because of the many variables involved.

David Crystal
A language is said to be dead when no one speaks it any more. It may continue to have existence in a recorded form, of course-traditionally in writing, more recently as part of a sound or video archive (and it does in a sense live on' in this way) – but unless it has fluent speakers one would not talk of it as a living language'. And as speakers cannot demonstrate their fluency if they have no one to talk to, a language is effectively dead when there is only one speaker left, with no member of the younger generation interested in learning it. But what do we say if there are two speakers left, or 20, or 200? How many speakers guarantee life for a language?

David Crystal
The main metaphor that is used to explain the historical relationship is that of the language family or family tree.

David Crystal
Language death is a terrible loss, to all who come into contact with it: Facing the loss of language or culture involves the same stages of grief that one experiences in the process of death and dying. ' We do not have to be members of an endangered community to sense this grief, or respond to it. Anyone who has worked with these communities, even over a short period, knows that it is a genuine insight, well justifying the dramatic nature of the analogy. And it is this keen, shared sense of loss which fuels the motivation and commitment of linguists, community groups, and support organizations in many parts of the world.

David Crystal
However language began, one thing is certain – it immediately began to change, and has been changing ever since. Languages are always in a state of flux. Change affects the way people speak as inevitably as it does any other area of human life. Language purists do not welcome it, but they can do very little about it. Language would stand still only if society did. A world of unchanging linguistic excellence, based on the brilliance of earlier literary forms, exists only in fantasy. The only languages that do not change are dead ones.

David Crystal
The aim of linguistics is to go beyond the study of individual languages to determine what the universal properties of language are, and to establish a 'universal grammar' that would account for the range of linguistic variation that is humanly possible.

David Crystal
A dictionary is a reference book that lists the words of one or more languages, usually in alphabetical order, along with information about their spelling, pronunciation, grammatical status, meaning, history, and use.

David Crystal
I believe that any form of writing exercise is good for you. I also believe that any form of tuition which helps develop your awareness of the different properties, styles, and effects of writing is good for you. It helps you become a better reader, more sensitive to nuance, and a better writer, more sensitive to audience. Texting language is no different from other innovative forms of written expression that have emerged in the past. It is a type of language whose communicative strengths and weaknesses need to be appreciated.

David Crystal
Every language that English has come into contact with, it's pinched some of the words — thousands and thousands of words in many cases. And something like six-hundred languages have loaned or given words to English over the past 1,000 years.

David Crystal
The question Why do we use language? seems hardly to require an answer. But, as is often the way with linguistic questions, our everyday familiarity with speech and writing can make it difficult to appreciate the complexity of the skills, we have learned. This is particularly so when we try to define the range of functions to which language can be put.

David Crystal
During the later part of the 19th century, it was believed that a sound of change affected the whole of a language simultaneously: one sound system would smoothly develop into the next, and all words which contained a particular sound would be affected in the same way.

David Crystal
Fluency [is] smooth, rapid, effortless use of language.

David Crystal
We now know that linguistic change does not operate in such an across-the-board manner. Some speakers introduce the change into their speech before others; some use it more frequently and consistently than others; and some words are affected before others. A more accurate view is to think of a change gradually spreading through the words of a language – a view that is known as a lexical diffusion. At first just a few people use a change sporadically in a few words (commonly occurring words are influenced very quickly); then a large number of words are affected, with the sound gradually being used more consistently; then the majority of the words take up the change.

David Crystal
For a language is really alive only as long as there is someone to speak it to. When you are the only one left, your knowledge of your language is like a repository, or archive, of your people's spoken linguistic past. If the language has never been written down, or recorded on tape—and there are still many which have not—it is all there is. But, unlike the normal idea of an archive, which continues to exist long after the archivist is dead, the moment the last speaker of an unwritten or unrecorded language dies, the archive disappears for ever. When a language dies which has never been recorded in some way, it is as if it has never been.

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

David Crystal
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.

David Crystal
Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed considerable literacy awareness. Before you can write and play with abbreviated forms, you need to have a sense of how the sounds of your language relate to the letters. You need to know that there are such things as alternative spellings.

David Crystal
People think that the written language seen on mobile phone screens is new and alien, but all the popular beliefs about texting are wrong. Its graphic distinctiveness is not a new phenomenon, nor is its use restricted to the young.

David Crystal