Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Swearing makes an excellent relief mechanism
The internet is an amazing medium for languages.
Vocabulary is a matter of word-building as well as word-using.
At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries - eventually - reflect popular choices.
Online, you show how brilliant you are by manipulating the language of the Internet.
Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.
There is no such thing as an ugly accent, like there's no such thing as an ugly flower.
It hasn't been a problem with Ben, I think we worked together very well, we don't have rows.
Although many texters enjoy breaking linguistic rules, they also know they need to be understood.
As I get older and I get a few more years experience I become more like Dad, you know, King Lear.
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.
One notable feature is that English doesn't have much of a system for expressing relative social status.
Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.
The one thing about internet language, people join it, and what quickly evolves is an 'internet dialect,' as it were.
The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
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.
Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.
Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.
Language itself changes slowly, but the Internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.
Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.
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
English does have a larger vocabulary than other languages because of its history as the primary language of science and its global reach.
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.
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.
Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development
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.
What turns teenagers on more than the Internet these days? If you can get a language out there, the youngsters are much more likely to think it's cool.
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.
Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries eventually reflect popular choices. And the Internet is allowing more people to influence spelling than ever before.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's very difficult to find even one or two criteria that you will find in every Internet situation, and the reason is that the technology constrains language in individual ways.
Over the last 50 years or so, we have seen an increasing cultural diversification across the country. Accents are a reflection of society, and as society changes, so accents change.
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.
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.
Grammar is what gives sense to language .... sentences make words yield up their meaning. Sentences actively create sense in language. And the business of the study of sentences is grammar.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
'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!