“The only languages which do not change are dead ones.”, “Imagine, I said, what could happen if English continues to grow as it has. Maybe one day it will be the only language left to learn. If that happens, I concluded, it will be the greatest intellectual disaster that the planet has ever known.”, “This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.”, For every one native speaker of English there are now five non-native speakers. The centre of gravity in the use of English has shifted, therefore., Everyone who has taken the trouble to learn English can be said to ‘own’ it now, and they all have a say in its future., Those with a nostalgia for linguistic days of old may not like it, but it will not be possible to stop such international trends., “Mixed accents are the norm these days. Even if you don’t travel, you’re not immune from accent shift. Innumerable voices enter your home every day through radio, television, the telephone, and the internet.”, “Old attitudes die hard, of course, and there will still be those who mourn the passing of the days when a single accent ruled the British airwaves. But they are a steadily shrinking minority.”, “The news isn’t all positive in relation to regional accents. There are pockets of resistance to the general trend, some quite influential. A report in the Independent (7 March 2017) was headed: Banking jobs denied to young people due to having ‘wrong accents”, “Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development.”, “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.”, “Language itself changes slowly but the internet has speeded up the process of those changes so you notice them more quickly.”, “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.”, “Texting has added a new dimension to language use, but its long-term impact is negligible. It is not a disaster.”, “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.”, “At any one time language is a kaleidoscope of styles, genres and dialects.”, “Spellings are made by people. Dictionaries – eventually – reflect popular choices.”, “This is a lesson everyone who studies language eventually learns. You cannot stop language change. You may not like it ; you may regret the arrival of new forms and the passing of old ones but there is not the slightest thing you can do about it. Language change is as natural as breathing. It is one of the linguistic facts of life.”,

David Crystal Language Change Quotes

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