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'The best texters are always the best spellers’

In a candid conversation with Khaleej Times, David Crystal, world’s foremost linguist, talks about diversity and how the Internet has contributed to making language creative.

David Crystal has over 100 books to his name. He is an honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales, whose seminal works include The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Awarded the OBE for services to the English language in 1995, Crystal is among the top names scheduled to speak at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, which began on Tuesday. Excerpts.

You spoke about ‘language death’ in one of your books. Explain what you mean by that?

The disappearance of a language because nobody can speak it any more. Around half of the world’s 6000+ languages are now so seriously endangered that they are going to die out in the course of the present century. As I say in Language Death, there’s a language disappearing every two weeks on average. There is thus an urgent need to document, and where possible revitalise, as many of these languages as possible, for each of them is a unique vision of what is means to be human. When a language dies, the loss is everyone’s.

Q: What, according to you, is the influence of Internet on language?

It has offered us new ways of communicating, as all new technologies do, and each new way presents us with a new style. Think of all the new styles that came in with broadcasting, such as news-reading and sports commentary. The same thing is happening electronically with social media, email, and so on. In other words, the Internet is increasing the expressive richness of language.    But so far it has had very little impact on individual languages. When you compare English today in all its contexts with English in 1990, the changes are very few — nothing to talk about in grammar, just a few thousand new words and abbreviations (a drop in the ocean of vocabulary), and a few new orthographic conventions.

People were struck by the novelty of some Internet styles, when they arrived, and thought languages were going to change radically; but this has turned out not to be the case. And several of the novel features that were around a decade ago (such as many early texting abbreviations) have now disappeared.

You disagree with the commonly held view that the use of slang, such as those in SMS language, will lead to low literacy? Don’t you think text-speak is responsible for bad spelling among kids?

Not at all. The research — and there are many studies now — shows very clearly that the opposite is the case: that you can only text well if you can spell well.  The best texters are always the best spellers. And the more you text, the more you are likely to improve your literacy in general. If children are bad spellers, this is due to other reasons. Usually, it’s because they haven’t been taught the principles of spelling well - something I go into in another book, Spell it Out.

You highlighted the ‘value in linguistic diversity’ in your 2004 book The Stories of English. What do you mean by that?

For a long time, the focus of study in English language has been on the standard language and on the upper-class accents (such as Received Pronunciation) associated with it. But most people in Britain don’t use standard English or Received Pronunciation in their everyday speech. They speak a regional dialect with regional pronunciation. I argue in The Stories of English that this dialect diversity has always been at the heart of the language, and shouldn’t be ignored. And not just British English, of course. Wit over two billion people speaking English around the world these days, the number of local dialects and accents is huge, and any of them might turn up in the UAE spoken by tourists at any time. So the more people can become aware of this diversity, the better.

You have had such a productive career. How do you always find something to write about?

Language is like that. Whatever a language is like today, it will be different tomorrow, so there are always new stories waiting to be told. And sometimes developments take place that are so far-reaching that everything we knew before has to be rethought.   The internet, I suppose, is the best example of that. As your earlier question suggested, it was by no means obvious what would happen to language as a result of the internet.

The changes haven’t yet been very great, as I said, but there have been some, and this opens up a new area of study straight away. And what is true for one language is true for all. Of those 6,000 or so languages, only a small number have been thoroughly investigated, and many have had no study at all. There’s never a shortage of things to do, when you’re a linguist.

Yours has been a life in languages. Looking back at life, would you like it any other way?

I can imagine a number of other lives that would have been nice to have lived. But a life in languages is certainly hugely rewarding, as well as being fascinating.   It is such a diverse field, ranging from the sciences (in phonetics) to the arts (in literature).  One day you might be in a phonetics laboratory analysing sound waves; the next in a theatre working with a company of actors.

One day you might be in a clinic with speech pathologists helping children with language handicaps; the next you might be working on ways of bringing a language back from the danger of extinction. I can’t think of another subject that offers such a diverse range of opportunities. So I suppose the short answer to your question is: No. -sadiq@khaleejtimes.com