94 Quotes by David Crystal

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.

One of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend - and a blend is when you run two words together to make a third word.

When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.