Explore Quotes by David Crystal

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.

Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.

Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next.

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

One of the places the full stop is really being revised in a really fundamental way is on the Internet. You look at the Internet or any instant messaging exchange - anything that is a fast dialogue taking place. People simply do not put full stops in unless they want to make a point.

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.

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

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.

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

Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.

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.

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.

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

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.

There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.

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.

Word books traditionally focus on unusual and quirky items. They tend to ignore the words that provide the skeleton of the language, without which it would fall apart, such as 'and' and 'what,' or words that provide structure to our conversation, such as 'hello.'

One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.