There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.
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.
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.
At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.
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 every social group has its own linguistic bonding mechanism. If there's a group of lawyers, they have their own slang. If there's a group of doctors, they have their own slang, and so on.
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.
A feature of English that makes it different compared with all other languages is its global spread.
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
The death of a language. The word has the same kind of reluctant resonance as it has when we talk about the death of a person. And indeed, that's how it should be. For that's how it is. A language dies only when the last person who speaks it dies.
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.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
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.
Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.
Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.
Bilingualism lets you have your cake and eat it. The new language opens the doors to the best jobs in society; the old language allows you to keep your sense of 'who you are.' It preserves your identity. With two languages, you have the best of both worlds.
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 - they form part of the linguistic color of a period.
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.
Everybody wants to say who they are and where they're from. And the easiest and cheapest and most universal way of doing that is through their accent.
You can say now, 'I dissed him' - to diss, I dissed him - or, 'Stop dissing her'. And that's the interesting thing, that it's the prefix that's become the verb! It's a most remarkable development.
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
Languages like English, Spanish, and Chinese are healthy languages. They exist in spoken, written, and signed forms, and they're used by hundreds of millions of people all over the world. But most of the 6,000 or so of the world's languages aren't in such a healthy state.
The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
'Spell it Out' rose to be number 4 on the best-selling Amazon chart - ahead of 'Fifty Shades of Grey!' Who ever would have thought that spelling would one day beat sex - even if it was for only a few hours!
We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.
Increasingly, over the past ten years, I've come to take the view that a cultural perspective is intrinsic to the future of language teaching and learning, especially in the case of English, as it becomes increasingly global.
One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
How do you spell the name of the Irish prime minister? It sounds like 'teeshuck', but we spell it 'taoiseach.' We respect foreign spellings these days - a sign of our more egalitarian times, perhaps.
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.
The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior. Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn't want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There's a new kind of ethos now.
One of the lesser-known ways of making new words is to form a blend - and a blend is when you run two words together to make a third word.
Speaking, writing, and signing are the three ways in which a language lives and breathes. They are the three mediums through which a language is passed on from one generation to the next.
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 in the past. We're seeing languages dying out on a massive scale.
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.
Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.
When we look at the specific effect of the Internet on language, languages asking the question, 'Has English become a different language as a result of the Internet?' the answer has to be no.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, 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.
English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.
It doesn't take a language long to disappear once the spirit to continue with it leaves its community. In fact, the speed of the decline has been one of the main findings of recent linguistic research.
Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.
The one thing about internet language, people join it, and what quickly evolves is an 'internet dialect,' as it were.
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.'
One of the places the full stop is really being revised in a really fundamental way is on the Internet. You look at the Internet or any instant messaging exchange - anything that is a fast dialogue taking place. People simply do not put full stops in unless they want to make a point.
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.
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.
People say that text messaging is a new language and that people are filling texts with abbreviations - but when you actually analyse it, you find they're not.
The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows.
