Top 30 David Crystal Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— David Crystal

2. “A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.”

— David Crystal

3. “Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development.”

— David Crystal

4. “Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.”

— David Crystal

5. “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.”

— David Crystal

6. “Language death is like no other form of disappearance. When people die, they leave signs of their presence in the world, in the form of their dwelling places, burial mounds, and artefacts – in a word, their archaeology. But spoken language leaves no archaeology. When a language dies, which has never been recorded, it is as if it has never been.”

— David Crystal

7. “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

8. “Intonation is the use of pitch to convey meaning in a language. It has been described as the music or melody of speech.”

— David Crystal

9. “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

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

— David Crystal

11. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

12. “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.”

— David Crystal

13. “The only languages which do not change are dead ones.”

— David Crystal

14. “Swearing makes an excellent relief mechanism.”

— David Crystal

15. “This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.”

— David Crystal

16. “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.”

— David Crystal

17. “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.”

— David Crystal

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

— David Crystal

19. “Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn’t linguistically sensible.”

— David Crystal

20. “It’s often thought that the only function of pronunciation is to facilitate intelligibility; but it is also there to express personal or group identity.”

— David Crystal

21. “Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries – eventually – reflect popular choices.”

— David Crystal

22. “In effect we are, bending and breaking the rules of the language. And if someone were to ask why we do it, the answer is simply: for fun.”

— David Crystal

Featured in: Fun Quotes

23. “Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.”

— David Crystal

24. “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.”

— David Crystal

25. “Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.”

— David Crystal

26. “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

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

— David Crystal

28. “People sometimes say: ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ That’s true. But language is never far away. To talk about the picture, you may need a thousand words.”

— David Crystal

29. “The chief characteristic of English grammar is the way words are arranged within sentences, and the technical term for this process is syntax. It.”

— David Crystal

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

— David Crystal

31. “Academics don’t normally manage to alter people’s way of thinking through their strength of argument.”

— David Crystal

32. “The end of his great project was in sight, and then he encountered the verb take, with its remarkable number of senses. He had had to deal with complicated verbs before: come had ended up with 56 senses, go had 68 and put had 80. But take was going to require an unprecedented 124.”

— David Crystal

33. “Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don’t travel, you’re not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.”

— David Crystal