David Crystal

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.”

“The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.”

“Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.”

“Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities.”

“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.”

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

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

“It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.”

“What turns teenagers on more than the Internet these days? If you can get a language out there, the youngsters are much more likely to think it's cool.”

“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.”

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