David Crystal

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography. ”

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

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

A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread. ”

English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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. ”

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