“In Old English, thou ( thee, thine , etc.) was singular and you was plural. But during the thirteenth century, you started to be used as a polite form of the singular - probably because people copied the French way… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
I don't have any particular desire to see words making a comeback. They are of their era, after all, and that is their identity… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
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… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
One of the places the full stop is really being revised in a really fundamental way is on the Internet. You look at the… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly. — David Crystal Copy Share Image
We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible. — David Crystal Copy Share Image
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… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
“Here are three elements we often see in town names: If a town ends in “-by”, it was originally a farmstead or a small village where some of the Viking invaders settled. The first part of the name sometimes referred to the person who owned the farm - Grimsby was “Grim’s village”. Derby was “a village where deer were found”.… — David Crystal Copy Share
There's nothing unusual about a single language dying. But what's going on today is extraordinary when we compare the situation to what has happened… — David Crystal Copy Share Image
