Best quotes by David Crystal on People

Checkout quotes by David Crystal on People

• ‟ 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.

  - 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.

  - David Crystal
  

• ‟ Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.

  - David Crystal
  

• ‟ Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.

  - David Crystal
  

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

  - David Crystal
  

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

  - David Crystal
  

• ‟ Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.

  - David Crystal
  

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

  - David Crystal
  

• ‟ 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.

  - David Crystal
  

• ‟ People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it, you find they're not.

  - David Crystal
  

• ‟ In Cardiff, I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi. This pattern is repeating itself in many urban communities across the U.K.; people are especially keen to develop a strong sense of local identity.

  - 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.

  - David Crystal