"The Internet has given us 10 or 15 new styles of communication: long messages like blogging, and then short messages like texting and tweeting. I see it all as part of an expanding array of linguistic possibilities."
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"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"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."
David Crystal