David Crystal Quotes

The ways in which language changes never ceases to interest me.

I have always loved the fluidity of language - delighting in dialects, dictionaries, slang and neologisms.

Language is a living thing. We can feel it changing. Parts of it become old: they drop off and are forgotten. New pieces bud out, spread into leaves, and become big branches, proliferating.

Britain's fascination with its changing language is renowned.

One of the joys of language is its constant evolution, and a lexicographer's job is both to track new words and to reassess those from the past.

People have been warning us that language was going to the dogs ever since Latin started turning into French. Yet the dogs in question never seem to emerge yelping on the horizon.

That's one of the ways language evolved, by some very obscure form becoming common usage. And I must say that I'm very intrigued by use of language and slang, and criminal underground terms.

Greek was very much a live language, and a language still unconscious of grammar, not, like ours, dominated by definitions and trained upon dictionaries.

Language is always evolving. It's difficult to read Shakespeare now because language has shifted. Similarly, kids these days can get to the point really quick in about 140 characters or less because of these new tools.

It is useful to the historian, among others, to be able to see the commonest forms of different phenomena, whether phonetic, morphological or other, and how language lives, carries on and changes over time.

Speakers of English love to invent and reinvent the language.

In general, I agree with Jacob Grimm and feel that we ought to permit changes and uncontrolled growth in language. Even though that also allows potentially threatening new words to develop, language needs the chance to constantly renew itself.

Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language.

I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.

Language should be an ever developing procedure and not an isolated occurrence.

The British have slang words, as we do, but it was fun.

I love the English language, the colors of it, the many, many nuances, the different influences. I find German stilted, in a way, by comparison.

Language is ever on the move, and most days, I check out the 'Urban Dictionary' where anyone can invent a new and useful word or phrase.

I was always interested in language. I thought, why not? If a painting, by the normal definition of the term, is paint on canvas, why can't it be painted words on canvas?

A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.

Language does not stand still. Surprisingly, despite this knowledge, most speakers are fearful of change.

I just love dialects; they're really fun.

Language, after all, is organic. You can't force words into existence. You can't force new meanings into words. And some words can't or won't or shouldn't be laundered or neutered. Language develops naturally.

The verb is relatively of much greater importance in an Indian tongue than in a civilized language.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.