David Crystal

"The structural properties of the language are many and complex, but at least they are finite and fairly easy to identify: there are only so many sounds, letters, and grammatical constructions, and alt…"

"For a language is really alive only as long as there is someone to speak it to. When you are the only one left, your knowledge of your language is like a repository, or archive, of your people’s spoke…"

"The structural closeness of languages to each other has often been thought to be an important factor in FLL . If the L2 is structurally similar to the L1 , it is claimed, learning should be easier tha…"

"Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others."

"The aim of linguistics is to go beyond the study of individual languages to determine what the universal properties of language are, and to establish a ‘universal grammar’ that would account for the r…"

"Language may not determine the way we think, but it does influence the way we perceive and remember, and it affects the ease with which we perform mental tasks."

"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,…"

"There is little scientific data on the point, but evidently people do speak to themselves."