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.

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.

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

Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.

Ever since the arrival of printing - thought to be the invention of the devil because it would put false opinions into people's minds - people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language.

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.

Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.

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.'

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.

Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people's anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.