Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
Category Archive: David Crystal
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries – eventually – reflect popular choices.
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.
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn’t linguistically sensible.
A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.
Academics don’t normally manage to alter people’s way of thinking through their strength of argument.
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.
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.