Journal of Linguistics and Language Teaching
Volume 14 (2023) Issue 2, pp 243-260
Interview:
10 Questions for Professor David Crystal
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| (Photo courtesy of David Crystal) |
Professor David Crystal, the world-renowned British linguist, author, and educationalist, has made significant contributions to the field of linguistics, especially in the study of English language. Presently Honorary Professor of Linguistics at Bangor University, he has written, co-written, and edited more than 120 books on a diverse range of topics. He has also published multiple books on linguistics and the English language for general readers, which use a combination of graphics and short essays to present technical material in an easily understandable way.
Born on July 6, 1941, in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, he spent his early years in Holyhead, North Wales. His passion for language was evident from an early age. In 1966, he obtained his doctorate in English studies from the University of London.
David Crystal's expertise extends to various aspects of language, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. He has published extensively on these topics, producing numerous books and articles that have gained worldwide recognition. His works demystify language complexities, making them accessible to a broad audience, including educators, students, and the general public.
David Crystal's passion for language extends beyond academic pursuits. He has been actively involved in promoting language awareness and fostering public appreciation of linguistics. He has chaired numerous international conferences, served on editorial boards of prominent linguistics journals, and regularly contributes to radio and television programs. His engaging style and insightful commentary have made him a popular figure in the linguistic community.
His contributions to Shakespeare studies are particularly noteworthy. He has written extensively on the language of Shakespeare's plays, providing insights into their historical context, linguistic nuances, and enduring impact on English. His works, in several cases together with his son Ben, have contributed to a greater understanding of Shakespeare's genius and the profound influence of his language on the development of English.
David Crystal's involvement in Shakespeare productions has further
complemented his academic endeavours. He has served as a consultant
for various theatre productions, providing expert guidance on the
linguistic authenticity and historical accuracy of the language used.
His insights have helped to ensure that Shakespeare's works are
performed with sensitivity and authenticity, preserving their
linguistic richness and cultural significance.
JLLT: Professor Crystal, without exaggeration, it can be said that you are one of the leading researchers in linguistics and the communication of linguistic findings to the general public. You have agreed to answer ten highly relevant questions about your domain for JLLT, which will allow our readers to gain insight into the world of language and linguistics and be inspired by your viewpoints and approaches.
Our first question refers to linguistics itself.
What are the practical applications of linguistic research in areas such as language teaching, from your perspective?
David Crystal: Linguistics is the science of language study - so anyone who studies the facts of language in a systematic and objective way is, in effect, doing linguistics. Language learners are especially likely to engage with the subject, because their task makes them aware of the differences between their first language and the language(s) they are learning. As soon as they try to understand the differences, and think about why they are there, they are doing linguistics. And once they start thinking about one or two languages, it's a short step to start thinking about them all, and wondering about what generalisations might be made about the human faculty of language. And suddenly they’re in the world of De Saussure, Chomsky, et al.
The notion of 'practical application' sends us in a different direction: applied linguistics. This is the domain which focuses specifically on the challenges or problems facing people who have to use language, especially professionally, and brings the theories, methods, and findings of linguistics to their aid. There are many areas of everyday life that have been helped in this way, as any applied linguistics journal (such as JLLT) or conference illustrates. For instance, I spent many years applying findings from the linguistic description of English and child language acquisition to the field of speech pathology, and this approach has since been taken up and applied to over 30 other languages.1 And several more years were devoted to applying semantics, pragmatics, and other branches of linguistics to investigating the problems raised by internet search engines.2 And of course, in language teaching and learning there's now a huge literature on those areas that have been illuminated by a linguistic perspective.
Language teachers, above all, need the facts of a language to be able to teach them; and because language changes so much over time, and varies so much from place to place, it can be difficult to keep up with what is happening - which is where descriptive linguistic studies play an important part. But it's not just the facts of a language that are relevant: it's the explanation of the facts that teachers find useful, as it helps them answer the questions their students come up with. Why does this particular feature of grammar, pronunciation, spelling, punctuation... work in the way it does? Not all the answers are known, but it is linguistics that has provided many of the answers that we already have. The challenge for applied linguists, of course, is to find ways of explaining the facts in a way that will be understood by teachers with less awareness of linguistic terminology. Applied linguists are always finding they are having to tell half-truths – omitting aspects of the explanation that they would make if they were talking to fellow-linguists. But, at a basic descriptive level, there's no barrier to appreciating the findings about usage presented by – for example – the field of corpus linguistics, especially when they inform about ongoing language change.
An illustration is the way in which some English modal verbs are currently changing their use. Corpora3 show very clearly that shall, must, and may have all had a significant reduction in frequency of use since the 1980s, especially in American English, in both speech and writing. They've been replaced by semi-modal constructions, such as have to, be going to, and want to - in colloquial speech hafta, gonna, and wanna. You can feel the difference if you compare must and have to in expressing an obligation. You must be more careful sounds authoritarian: 'I'm telling you'. You have to be more careful is more sympathetic: 'I'm worried about you'. There seems to be a lessening of the strength of a commitment. Is this part of a social and psychological change taking place towards equality and seeing the other point of view - a less egocentric view of the world? It's the kind of talking point that can add extra interest to a lesson on this area of grammar.
JLLT: As someone who has carried out research into language and the internet, could you elaborate on the ways in which online communication platforms have influenced language, culture, and identity?
David Crystal: It's too early to say what the long-term influence could be. After all, the internet has only become part of everyday lives since the mid-1990s - 30 years or so, which is an eye-blink in the history of language. And the field changes so rapidly that it's difficult to make linguistic generalisations with any confidence. The example that always comes to my mind is Twitter, which began in 2006 as an online short-messaging service. Users were given a prompt ('What are you doing?') which elicited replies that favoured present tenses and first-person pronouns, and these features would have been a prominent part of any generalisation about the linguistic character of that medium. But in November 2009, Twitter changed its prompt (to 'What's happening?'), which immediately elicited other pronominal forms and tenses, so the earlier generalisation was now of interest only to historical linguists! Soon after, other features emerged, such as the hashtag, whose function also went through an evolution, from originally being a classificatory tool (#Hamlet would collate all messages with that label) to one that identified messages felt to be of special importance to the sender - and by implication, to any readers (#I'm seeing Hamlet this week). Other changes, such as to the permitted length of a message, abbreviatory conventions for links to websites, and new monitoring criteria, continue to demonstrate the evolving linguistic character of the medium. And it remains to be seen what impact artificial intelligence will have (see further below).
Every platform I explored brought to light similar issues - and here it should be borne in mind that my work in this area was in the 1990s and early 2000s, so I have nothing to say about what may be going on in more recent social media. I have never ticked or tocked, for example: that is for a new generation of linguists to explore. But I wouldn't expect the findings to be radically different from those that emerged in the early days of electronic communication. Language, culture, and identity? Identity was there from the outset - not only in the technological character of the various media, with their identifiable interactive and visual conventions, but in the way individual users introduced linguistic idiosyncrasies, such as nonstandard spellings, new abbreviations, novel upper-case and lowe-case choices, and minimal or exaggerated punctuation – all eagerly exploited by others in their online community. Culture was a part of this, seen notably in code-mixing, where a chatroom might, for example, contain a high proportion of Spanish/English mixes or a combination of standard English and local dialect vocabulary (see further below).
Nor do I expect there to be any change in the way the internet has influenced the form of individual languages – which so far has been hardly at all. Electronic communication has of course provided us with many new methods of communicating, such as hypertext linking, cutting and pasting, and the ability to interact simultaneously with several correspondents, but the actual amount of linguistic change has hitherto been minimal.4 We've seen several distinctive new styles, as in blogs, short messaging, and email forms of address (Hi dave). A few thousand new words have been added to the language (blog, blogger, blogosphere, bloglessness…) along with a sprinkling of abbreviations (such as LOL - but not as many as people think). Grammar hasn't changed at all, despite a couple of short-lived morphological innovations in the 1990s, such as extending the use of the rare -en plural (as in oxen) to new items (as in VAXen for more than one VAX computer). And even the more noticeable orthographic developments, such as the use of multiple punctuation marks (really???!!!), haven't radically changed the graphology. In short, the language we use online now is virtually the same as the language that was being used before the internet arrived. Any impression to the contrary is the result of an over-reaction to the early novelties of internet expression. People were struck by the new features, not realising that many of these were temporary fashions that would leave no permanent footprint; for example, most of the abbreviations that were popular in the early days of text-messaging have now disappeared. What we have seen, then, is an increase in the stylistic richness of language - as with any new technology. We saw the same sort of growth in mediums of expression (new vocabulary, genres, and so on) when printing, the telephone, and broadcasting arrived.
I doubt whether the latest technological developments are likely to alter this scenario, but it's early days, so we must wait and see. The internet has hitherto been a predominantly graphic medium, and is adapting to a medium in which spoken communication will be pre-eminent. What happens to speech in such circumstances? There are changes, as has already been noted in relation to platforms such as Zoom, where the lack of simultaneous feedback (the use of reaction signals, such as oh? yes, really?, mhm…) has made users adapt their conversational strategy, but it's too soon to say whether these changes will be long-lasting, as people become more experienced in using the medium. Similarly, spoken interaction with computers – including car navigation systems, phone answering services (press 1 for…, press 2 for…), computer dictation, oral translation devices (such as Babelfish), and digital assistants (such as Siri) – is at a primitive stage, and we have to learn new communicative strategies to elicit acceptable responses, such as speaking more slowly or moderating a broad regional accent; but these will become less necessary as the systems become more sophisticated.
Gaining that sophistication is another area where linguistic awareness can make a major contribution. What accent should we give a robot? Early studies suggest that the factors involved are the same as those already noted in sociolinguistic studies, such as accommodation. In one project, people reacted more positively to a robot giving medical advice when the machine spoke in their regional accent.5 But there are many domains awaiting research answers, such as why car drivers find some voices more comfortable than others, when their navigation system gives them instructions. And it will be interesting to see if artificial intelligence alters these scenarios. Again, I think it unlikely. AI is fed by existing language data, so it will do no more than hold a mirror up to what is already 'out there'. But it's worth pointing out that the linguistic character of that mirror will be influenced by the location of the large companies investing in AI. If most of these are American, for example, we will see more American English (spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, grammar) in contexts where traditionally other dialects would be usual. And it remains to be seen whether other languages than English will develop an AI presence comparable to what we have seen so far in the internet, which has become an increasingly multilingual medium over the past 30 years. When the internet began, the only language with a significant presence was English. That language is still the dominant voice – reflecting the global situation, which I'll discuss shortly – but around 500 languages have a noticeable presence now,6 and perhaps another thousand are dipping their linguistic toes into the internet water, including (especially in social media) several minority and endangered languages. But with over 6000 languages in the world, and an appreciable but unknown number of dialects, there is a long way to go before the electronic world replicates the linguistic diversity of the planet.
JLLT: You have explored the concept of ‘language death’ and efforts to revitalise endangered languages. What progress or challenges have you observed in language preservation efforts, and what role does linguistics play in this context?
David Crystal: I should preface my response by saying that this 'exploration' has been indirect: I've never personally carried out 'field linguistics' of the kind that many linguists spend their lives doing, often in challenging conditions. My role has been to stand on their shoulders and present their work to a readership who otherwise might not be aware of (a) the crisis facing the world's linguistic diversity, and (b) what linguists are doing to document and (where possible) revitalise endangered languages. The primary role is of course documentation, with the clock ticking, especially in relation to languages where there's little or no intergenerational transmission, so that good linguistic descriptions are needed as a matter of urgency. This sounds like a straightforward matter – the kind of descriptive task that a linguist might carry out, into any language, working from the comfort of an office or home computer and library. The main message from endangerment studies over the past twenty years has been that the tasks of documentation and revitalisation raise issues that no linguist working happily on syntax in Old English is ever likely to encounter. The papers in recent collections have begun to elucidate these issues, and to introduce a new realism in the subject which was hardly ever present in the 1990s.7
One talks about 'languages' dying' but it is the last speakers who actually die, and the task of recording their speech in a sensitive, responsible, and rewarding way has been one of the challenges. Another has been the recognition of the social and political realities that surround speakers. There may be personal and tribal conflicts of interest within a community, economic issues, and often radically different views about what is needed to enable a language to survive. There will be community sensitivities, as elders may not wish all of its knowledge to be made available to outsiders. Individual linguists, with limited time and money, can't record everything, so decisions have to be made about priorities: what variety of the language is to be the primary focus - or varieties, in the case of languages where there is systematic variation between groups, such as male and female speech.
The responses of an informant need to be accepted with caution, as often native speakers are poor at giving accurate cultural descriptions or definitions, especially when the entity is one, such as the description of a plant and its properties, that requires a degree of botanical specificity. How many of us would be able to give a precise description of a plant if asked to do so by an enquiring linguist? Lexicographers know how difficult it is to come up with clear definitions of lexical items. So one of the realisations in recent years is that linguists should not work alone, in documenting an endangered language, but need to work with botanists, zoologists, climatologists, pharmacologists, and others (see further below). In other words, there needs to be synergy between linguistic and encyclopaedic specialisms, if such notions as 'knowledge legacy' and 'cultural identity' are to be fruitfully explored. And we mustn't forget the ethical and legal issues relating to consultants or informants from the community, ensuring informed consent, respecting privacy, and establishing ownership, rights, and access to data.
Then again, who are the competent speakers? We know from our own languages that some people are more eloquent than others, and some have poor expressive skills. Fluency may vary among speaking, listening, reading, and writing. Among the few speakers of an endangered language there may be some with a speech handicap, such as a stammer. There may be a diaspora community whose language will inevitably differ from that of the home country. The community itself may have views about their language which may not be representative of the linguistic realities: there are always prescriptive and purist attitudes to be dealt with, especially when the elders have an ideology of a pure ancestral code that has to be respected. In such situations, the speech of younger people may be dismissed as incorrect. I've often encountered this situation in Wales, where teenagers speak a Welsh that includes, for example, more English loanwords than would be found in the traditional language, or internet slang, and are criticised for doing so. The point is serious, as intergenerational transmission is the one critical factor in ensuring the survival of an endangered language. The teenagers are the parents of the next generation, and if they are put off from speaking their home language, the situation is serious indeed.
These issues represent both progress and challenge and point the way towards something that is still a long way off: a sociolinguistically and pragmatically grounded theory of language endangerment. More case studies are needed to enable comparisons to be made among endangered situations, which can differ greatly. And at the same time, linguists can contribute to the broader issue of how to foster a public awareness of the crisis facing the world's languages that is comparable to what already exists in relation to eco-diversity. Ask a random sample of people if they know about the plight of plants and animals, and they will probably all say yes; ask them if they know about the plight of languages, and in my experience, hardly any will say yes unless they happen to live in one of the affected areas themselves. Here, linguists have an important role in keeping people up-to-date with research developments. When I wrote Language Death (2000), the received wisdom was that there were around 7000 languages in the world (a figure derived from the Ethnologue project), about half of which (estimates ranged from 15 to 90 percent) were likely to disappear in the course of the present century - which suggested a language death on average every two weeks. The guesses varied so much because there had been so few regional language surveys by the end of the 1990s. That situation has improved, thanks to UNESCO and other initiatives, so that a recent major review suggests that the death estimate is now one every three months or so, with the figure of 7000 very much in need of revision (I say 'over 6000' above). It is still a crisis, whose order of magnitude is far greater than the extinction rate being experienced in the biological world. Publicity is crucial, and the case for instituting language prizes and awards, and creating language museums, which can help provide that publicity, is as strong as ever (see further below). Apart from anything else, language documentation and revitalisation needs financial support, and fund-raising is essential to support the organisations that are doing their best to help, such as the Foundation for Endangered Languages in the UK.8
JLLT: In your book "English as a Global Language," you discuss the rise of English as a global lingua franca. How has this phenomenon developed, and what impact does it have on linguistic diversity and language policies worldwide?
David Crystal: I talk about the reasons for its development in the book - the political, industrial, economic, and cultural factors that have been, at various points in history, a primary stimulus for the global spread of English, so I won't repeat those issues here. What's especially interesting, to my mind, is to note what has happened since its publication in 1997 and its second edition in 2003. There hasn't been a third edition, but such a development has taken place for another book in which global English plays an important role, my Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, which has a similar publication history - first edition 1995, second in 2003, and now a third edition in 2019.
For the latest edition, I replicated the statistical estimates of global English usage, country by country. It's evident that the growth in usage is still significant – from 1.5 billion English users in 1995 to 2 billion by 2003 and 2.3 billion by 2019. But what I find especially interesting about that last figure is how it suggests a slowing down in the rate of increase. The growth between the first two editions was half a billion in eight years - roughly 600,000 a year. If that rate of increase had continued over the 16 years between 2003 and 2019 I would expect the later total to be nearer 3 billion, and 2.3 is a long way from that.
What accounts for the apparent slowing down? Perhaps there is a natural limit to the number of people worldwide who need to master a global lingua franca. Perhaps new translation technology has reduced the incentive to learn another language. Perhaps political pressure to use a local lingua franca has reduced the motivation to acquire English. There will be other factors. If the trend continues, an investigation of these hypotheses will prompt a new direction in English language research.
However, none of this seems to have slowed the maturation of global English varieties. Note the term 'maturation', which I use instead of 'emergence', in the context of increased linguistic diversity. As with all aspects of language, there are two sides: form and function. Hitherto, the focus in descriptive studies has been largely on the identification of the formal features that identify a 'new English' – features of phonology, orthography, grammar, vocabulary, and discourse. Relatively little attention has been paid to the sociolinguistic and stylistic function of these features within a community, how these features are evaluated and used, and whether they are accompanied by metalinguistic commentary.
In relation to this last point, my impression is that there's a growing confidence in the prestige of these 'new Englishes' within their local communities. I first noticed this with the development of 'new literatures' – poetry, novels, stories, plays, and other genres in which the distinctive English(es) of a region were being represented. At first, the authors wrote somewhat apologetically, evidently feeling it necessary to explain what the local English was. A character in a novel or short story would say something, and the speech would be glossed with such metalinguistic expressions as 'said Raum in his Krio idiom'. This kind of explicitness is much less likely to be encountered today. Having introduced a situation and characters, authors are more likely to present their speech without any further identification, though sometimes adding endnote glosses to explain regional usage, as in Suhayl Saadi's Psychoraag, with its mix of Standard British English, Scottish English, and Urdu. It's a clear indication of growing maturity in a new variety.
Literature is one of the institutions that characterise a society. Others include the broadcasting media, the internet, and reference publishing (such as dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and style guides). Another indication of maturity is when a new variety of English (or any language) is given the same kind of treatment as is routine in such established varieties as British and American English. Developments of this kind are too wide-ranging and expensive to be left entirely to individual organisations. A concern to foster linguistic institutionalisation needs to be part of a country's language policy. And of course, any such policy mustn't forget the issues addressed in the previous question, for the rise of global and international lingua francas is one of the factors underlying language endangerment, and establishing a balance between international and indigenous languages remains a major challenge in many countries.
JLLT: In your extensive career, you have written about the English language, including its history and evolution. Please identify a major change that the English language has undergone in recent decades. What trends do you anticipate for the near future?
David Crystal: One of the most important trends arises out of the global situation referred to in the previous question. Each of the international varieties has developed a local vocabulary of several thousand items reflecting the cultural identity of the community, and these can present a challenge to international understanding. This is a familiar experience in relation to British and American English - car boot / trunk, bonnet / hood, etc - but such regional usages are now increasingly seen and heard from all over the English-speaking world, especially online; so it's important to build a more systematic approach to cultural awareness into teaching practice than has been the case in the past.
A cultural lexicon is an important feature of any variety of world English. People unconsciously introduce expressions into their conversation that reflect their culture. In British English, for example, one might hear someone moaning about the M25 motorway, and not understand why (because of the many traffic jams) or saying that their watch 'isn’t Bond Street', and miss the allusion (Bond Street has some of the most expensive shops in London). If you know the cultural background, you have no problem; if you don't, the sentence is uninterpretable. Now, 'translate' these examples into the culture of other parts of the English-speaking world. What is the M25 or Bond Street of your culture?
This kind of cultural opaqueness can leave a learner bemused – and by 'learner' here, I include not only second-language learners but second-dialect learners as well. I, for example, have often been at a loss when talking to Americans who unconsciously drop idioms from baseball into their conversation, such as 'That was from out of left field', referring to an unexpected situation. Increased familiarity with American English has reduced this problem for many, but the comprehension barrier remains significant for parts of the world where the local English is less often encountered. And even with the most widely used varieties, there is an ongoing problem due to lexical change.
A group of people chatting in their variety of English in any part of the world would make similar allusions to their culture that outsiders would find opaque. Introducing a cultural dimension into a syllabus is thus an important goal, for any varieties of World English that students are likely to encounter, either through travel or (more likely) through online visits or interactions. Elsewhere, I've presented the case for an international crowd-sourced cultural lexicon.9 It remains a challenge.
Here's a fuller example of recent cultural change in English, from a conversation I heard in a doctor's surgery waiting room:
First Lady: Anything wrong?
Second Lady: No, just an MOT.
First Lady: Oh good. I had one a month ago.
Second Lady: Did you pass?
First Lady: Yes, fine.
Looking up MOT in a dictionary may not help. You will learn that it stands for Ministry of Transport, and – if you're lucky – be told that it's pronounced /ɛm əʊ tiː/, never /mɒt/ (so the indefinite article is an). People in the UK who own a vehicle that is three years old are obliged by law to have it tested annually to ensure it is safe, roadworthy, and not emitting an excessive amount of gas through the exhaust pipe. This is an MOT test, usually abbreviated to simply MOT. The only exemption is a vehicle built or first registered more than 40 years ago which has had no major changes. The name of the test has stayed the same, even though the name of the relevant government ministry was changed to Department for Transport in 2002. So we are likely to hear people say such things as 'My car has to have its MOT next week', 'Have you got the old MOT certificate?', and 'It's passed / failed its MOT.'
However, the ladies in the surgery weren't talking about their cars. They were referring to a routine check-up on health or well-being. And this notion has been increasingly applied to a wide variety of situations. A government pensions website is headed 'Mid-life MOT: take control of your future' - and the page explains:
The mid-life MOT is a package of support that gives you access to free, professional and independent guidance to help you with pension planning, working options and staying healthy.
An online horticulturist (Auntie Planty Garden Advice) offers a Garden MOT - 'I can spend time with you in your garden giving you an inventory of the goodies and baddies, and what you can do to make your new garden sparkle all year round.' Another Web headline is from an organisation called the Sleep Council: 'Bed MOT – Do I need a new bed?' Then there's this fine example from The Telegraph (31 July 2018): 'Does your marriage need an MOT?' And in 2024, there are many sites offering us an MOT for our desktop, laptop, tablet, or phone.
JLLT: Linguistics is often at the forefront of addressing language-related challenges in education. What recommendations do you have for educators based on linguistic research, especially in the context of language acquisition and literacy?
David Crystal: I take 'educators' in the broadest sense, to include not only school-teachers, but parents, relatives, and any kind of caretaker. And one of the most important recommendations for all, to my mind, is the importance of relating reading (and writing) to speaking (and listening). To become fluent readers, children need to read about what they like to talk about, and talk about what they like to read. There needs to be a bridge between reading and speaking, and this is provided by the people who are reading with them. Whether it's the child who is reading aloud, or the adult, it's a perfect situation to talk about what is in the book, and to relate the story or topic to their own world, and to the language(s) they already know. Nor need the caretakers face this task alone, these days, thanks to the emergence of 'listen and read books' - or 'read-along books', as they're often called: digitally enhanced books which allow children to hear what they read and to read what they hear. The opportunities to engage in this way with a wide range of stories and topics are far greater than could ever be provided by any one parent or teacher.
Several benefits arise by bringing reading and speaking together. Children learn how unfamiliar or irregularly spelled words and names are to be pronounced - a feature especially appreciated by second-language learners and by those who experience difficulty in reading. They are taken down avenues of reading they might not otherwise have entered, finding new genres and being exposed to new experiences - and are often motivated to try reading a book at a more advanced level. But for joint reading to be successful, full attention needs to be paid to the story, so that moments can be seized where the events or characters can be linked to the child's own background. Research also suggests that interactive reading is especially helpful when it includes actions that the readers can perform. With print books, the activities might be opening a window on a page, pressing a symbol to produce a noise, activating a pop-up structure, or simply pointing to words or pictures. With a book on a screen, tapping, swiping, dragging, and other touching activities can produce animation, sound effects, and colour changes, and enable searches to find a favourite passage. Online audio can be interactive too, as when a narrator asks a question, gives an instruction, or offers a reaction to what the reader has done. It can be reinforced by visual effects, such as highlighting text while it is being read aloud.10
I think the most relevant finding from research into child language acquisition is the emphasis on directed speech. There can be a lot of speech in a child's environment - from the radio or television, or from adults or other children talking – but little of this background is going to help language develop. By contrast, we see the greatest progress when someone focuses on what children are trying to say, provides some feedback, and gives them time to respond. It's the same when reading aloud with a child. Pages can be so full of interesting detail that the young reader can get lost within them. Colourful pictures can overwhelm the written text – which is where the reading task actually lies. Adults can help by gently directing the child's attention to the words and the relevant parts of the pictures, and making occasional comments on the way the story is unfolding, and always giving the child time to talk about what's happening in the story.
The aim in all this is to make children feel that reading is as comfortable an experience as listening is, even when they are reading by themselves. And to achieve this, it helps if activities are incorporated within the content of a book. These might take the form of asking readers a question, or setting a challenge. They might be allowed to choose among possible lines of development, as in a video game, or among alternative story-endings. They might be given the option of personalising their books, such as by adding their name or photograph, or being given an opportunity to draw or write (or type) annotations. It all fosters a sense of intimacy between the reader and the text. We call this 'a love of reading'.
Ownership is the ultimate aim. 'The author has written this story for ME!' After reading a story, children should feel that it has become a part of their life. And this may mean not accepting the way the narrator has told it. A character can have all kinds of voices, accents, and idiosyncrasies, and children have the right to try out their own interpretation, and decide that it is better. (Adults feel the same way when they watch a film of a favourite novel and say that an actor's portrayal of a character was nothing like what they imagined that character to be.) There's nothing wrong with children feeling that they have a better way of telling a story, or giving it a different ending. And those that think like this may, one day, be the novelists of the future.
JLLT: In your exploration of language play and creativity, you touch upon the artistic aspects of language. How can linguistic creativity be harnessed in educational settings, and what role does it play in fostering language development?
David Crystal: Linguistics has, rightly, focused on the two primary forces (or functions) that drive language: the need for mutual intelligibility, and the need to express identity. The former promotes the growth of standard dialects, national languages, pidgins, and international lingua francas. The latter promotes the growth of regional, social, and occupational accents and dialects, global varieties, literary genres, code-mixing, and multilingualism. But in recent decades it's been rewarding to see a third force receive the attention it deserves: the ludic function of language - or 'language play', as it's usually called - where speech, writing, and signing are manipulated solely for purposes of aesthetics, artistry, entertainment, or to demonstrate personal creativity. This function promotes the growth of linguistic humour (jokes, puns), literary deviance (especially in poetry), rhetorical flourishes in oratory, novel effects in advertising, and distinctiveness in any domain where the aim is to be 'different' from cultural norms.
There have now been many studies of ludicity in child language acquisition, as it appears from the earliest days in caretaker speech ('baby-talk'), and then in lullabies, nursery rhymes and jingles, childish nonsense words, and the innumerable orthographic variations seen in comics, games, and early readers.11 We hear it too in the read-along books mentioned in the answer to the previous question. Vocal play makes a book come alive, and provides an imaginative experience that can be very powerful, especially when distinctive voices are needed for fictional characters. Listening to how others tell their stories is also a useful lesson, as it fosters the development of oral performance skills. With good models to follow, children develop their ability to read with confidence, pace, feeling, and variety.12
The notion of creativity in 'language development' of course isn't restricted to the early years of language acquisition and literacy. It applies to all ages and circumstances - most noticeably in literary genres. British novelist Robert Graves once put it succinctly, with reference to poetry: “A poet has to master the main grammatical rules before daring to bend or break them”. His point can be generalised, for we can bend and break the rules of any aspect of language, not just grammar. We can play with pronunciation, spelling, punctuation, vocabulary, and any other aspect of language in order to create novel effects. This is something humans seem to do instinctively, online or offline, as it has been observed in any language that has been studied.13 And such playfulness is by no means solely the province of the native speaker. Second-language learners display a desirable confidence when, having mastered a rule in their target language, they then dare to bend or break it, for effect. And all can learn from the master of language play, William Shakespeare.
JLLT: The recent book Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life (London: Murray, 2023), you published with your son Ben, introduces Shakespearean lines for contemporary use. How does this book bridge the gap between Early Modern English and modern language, and what insights does it offer into the adaptability of Shakespearean language in everyday communication and, possibly, the English language classroom?
David Crystal: I think the first thing to be said is that the 'gap' isn’t that great. We are, after all, talking about 'Early Modern' English, not 'Middle' or 'Old' English, where the gap is indeed notable. I once made a calculation of the amount of lexical and grammatical difference.14 Of the approaching million words in the Shakespeare canon, what percentage are words that are no longer in use or that have changed their meaning in a way that makes them difficult to understand? The answer is only about 5 percent. And if we compare his use of syntax and morphology to the number of grammatical points (about 3500) listed in a good modern reference grammar - I used the 'Quirk grammar',15 which I knew intimately, having compiled its index - I found, again, only 5 percent of difference. The perception of difficulty in Shakespeare is not due to these basic properties of language, but arises rather from conceptual issues – for example, knowing who were the divinities of ancient Greece or Rome – and from the economy of expression that emerges when spoken language is manipulated to fit the metre of a poetic line. The impression of difficulty is also fostered by teaching orientated towards the need to pass exams, where students are presented with editions that are full of 'notes' that have to be learned, and are told they need to know the precise meaning of every word (something that we don’t insist upon in everyday conversation, where, for example, we can call someone a blithering idiot without having any clear idea about the meaning of blithering). While that depth of awareness is a desirable long-term goal, it is hugely off-putting when youngsters experience Shakespeare (or any playwright) only as a reading experience. Rather, Shakespeare should first be experienced on the stage, not the page.
This is the kind of background which motivated Ben and me to compile this new book. Both of us had been steeped in Shakespeare – he as an actor and director, me as a historical linguist and a fellow of Shakespeare's Globe in London – and we had collaborated on several projects, such as the glossary and language companion Shakespeare's Words (also at www.shakespeareswords.com) and in productions of plays in original pronunciation. We were struck by the way we would often drop Shakespearean expressions into our everyday conversation. For instance, I was once weeding the garden, and Ben arrived offering to help: 'For this relief, much thanks' I said (from the opening scene of Hamlet). We wondered just how many lines from the plays and poems would have that kind of everyday relevance, so we each read through the canon looking for them, and found close to 5000, from which we selected 1000 for our book - 366 lead quotes for each day of the year, and the remainder occurring in the associated commentaries.
Everyday lines do indeed, in our view, provide a bridge between then and now. Most could have been written yesterday. 'Better three hours too soon than a minute too late' (from The Merry Wives of Windsor) could apply to anyone needing to get to a meeting or to catch a train. 'Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast' (from Romeo and Juliet) is great advice for anyone rushing to get a job done. And some resonate especially with children. Which of them hasn't had night-time fears? 'In the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear' (from A Midsummer Night's Dream). The book has been out for some months now, and teachers have already told us how these quotes can stimulate a lively classroom discussion. And it prompts a curiosity about Shakespeare. Who said that first? Why did they say it? Can we see the play…?
JLLT: The study of intonation and prosody has been a part of your research. How do these elements contribute to our understanding of spoken language, and what implications do they have for language teaching and artificial intelligence applications?
David Crystal: Yes, this was my first linguistic love, fuelled by my first job as a research assistant on Randolph Quirk's Survey of English Usage. As the only phonetician on the project, I was tasked with making the prosodic transcription of the recordings of spoken English that were the basis of his innovative approach to grammar, which previously had been dominated by the written language. A wide range of genres was involved - everyday conversation, radio discussions, television advertisements, sermons… .16 The consequence was the discovery that the traditional system of intonation analysis – as developed by Daniel Jones and his students, and known in the ELT world through books by Roger Kingdon, O'Connor and Arnold, and others – was inadequate to describe the remarkable array of prosodic variation and tones of voice used by the speakers. Quirk and I wrote up the approach in Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English (1964) – my first foray into the world of linguistic publication. It opened my ears to the crucial role played by the nonsegmental (or suprasegmental) features of language as a means of expressing, not just the attitudinal meaning well described by those ELT authors, but also the way these features underpin so many aspects of grammar – not only the familiar contrasts such as the tonal contrast between statement and question, but effects that hadn't been described before, such as the use of low pitch range and an increase in speed identifying a piece of parenthetic speech. It was also clear that these features play a central role in the marking of identity, in regional accents and spoken styles, such as the contrast between formal and informal speech, or the array of vocal effects that identify different kinds of sports commentary.
Teachers have told me that becoming aware of the range of prosodic and paralinguistic features is especially relevant in relation to the teaching of comprehension, especially where cultural meanings differ – as when, for example, a giggling tone of voicer is interpreted as embarrassment (as in Japanese) instead of jocularity (as in English). Not all have to be formally taught. I imagine that the dramatic prosodic features that identify a football commentary will be encountered in any language that exploits this domain, without needing any teacher intervention to explain them. And the same applies to speech production, where some features will be acquired simply by transferring what is already part of the learner's first language (such as whispering, giggling, or speaking more loudly or quietly). But there is a core of prosody that does need formal attention, such as the way pitch and pause identify the contrast in English (and some other languages) between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses (my brother, who’s abroad, has sent me a letter ( I have only one brother) vs my brother who's abroad has sent me a letter (my other brothers haven't).
The challenge for artificial intelligence is to replicate the nonsegmental system accurately in all its semantic and social variability. The examples I've heard so far, based on the acoustic analysis of speech samples of individuals, have been very convincing: a sentence read in the voice of a celebrity does indeed sound like that celebrity. I've also heard examples where a particular distinctive feature of a celebrity voice quality (such as a nasal tone or a gruff voice) has been extracted and inserted into another voice, to make that person sound like the celebrity. But these are relatively straightforward techniques. Generalising from individuals to community norms, without stereotyping, is a much greater challenge, and it remains to be seen how successful AI will be. In some ways it's the Survey of English (or other languages) Usage all over again, but on an infinitely larger scale.
JLLT: Linguistics is increasingly interdisciplinary. How can collaboration with other disciplines enrich linguistic research and its applications?
David Crystal: All I can say is that, each time I've collaborated in this way, I've learned something new about my subject, and also seen how dependent applied linguistics is on other areas of expertise if it's to be successful in its endeavours. I've already mentioned the way other disciplines are increasingly involved in the field of endangerment linguistics. Clinical linguistics needs input from medical, psychological, and therapeutic practitioners if hypotheses about the nature of language disability are to be tested. ELT professionals need classroom equipment, technological aids, and the teaching materials provided by publishers. Research into historical phonology is enhanced when its hypotheses about plausible reconstructions are modelled by actors and voice coaches, as in the case of Shakespearean 'original pronunciation' productions. And while the initiative for a particular application may come from a non-linguistic domain, the development of that application can be dependent on the technology in the enquiring domain, as in the case of internet linguistics.
I illustrate from one project within that last domain, where the initial challenge was to solve the problem of misplaced online advertisements. A news report about a street stabbing was accompanied by ads saying 'buy your knives here' – clearly generated by an algorithm that was unable to make the semantic distinction between knife in the sense of 'weapon' and in the sense of 'cutlery'. The solution was to provide a lexical analysis in which all cases of potential ambiguity were identified and labelled, such as depression [psychiatric], [economic], [geological], [climatological]. It was a large and lengthy project, requiring the services of a team of lexicographers. But its implementation required a range of other disciplines, notably software developers and website designers, and not forgetting the disciplines that underpin all research projects, such as accountancy (to control the budget), lawyers (for contracts, patenting), and business consultancy. Then, when the result of the research has been turned into a product,17 it has to be sold, which requires people from marketing, advertising, and other agencies.
Yes, the history of linguistics, over the past half-century, has been increasingly collaborative – psycholinguists with psychologists and psychiatrists; sociolinguists with anthropologists, ethnographers, and sociologists; neurolinguists with neurologists and other medical specialists. Smaller domains of linguistic enquiry show a similar reaching out, such as forensic linguistics, working with law enforcement and legal personnel; or theolinguistics, where studies of religious language are enhanced by input from biblical scholars, liturgists, literary historians, and specialists in ancient languages.18 I don't see any of this changing as linguistics evolves in new directions.
JLLT: Looking ahead, what emerging trends or areas of study do you believe will shape the future of linguistics, and how can the discipline adapt to address the evolving linguistic landscape?
David Crystal: I never try to predict the future, when it comes to linguistic issues. Who in 1950 would have predicted the linguistics of 1960, following Chomsky's Syntactic Structures? Who in 1980 would have predicted the arrival and impact of the subject we now know of as pragmatics? And unpredictable forces give rise to new areas of study, such as the way the pandemic fostered a greater use of online platforms, with an associated growth of interest in the character of interactive communication, in a field that has yet to be named (zoomlinguistics?). It's obvious that artificial intelligence, robotics, and brain imaging will stimulate new directions of linguistic enquiry, as is implicit in some of my remarks above. And if 'they' land on earth, or probes encounter 'them' on other planets, the field of xenolinguistics (aka exolinguistics or astrolinguistics) will suddenly grow beyond the realm of science fiction. But, to my mind, any thoughts about an evolving linguistic landscape need to be related to wider issues.
All academic disciplines are subject to contemporary cultural norms and expectations, and one of the most noticeable trends today is what goes under the heading of 'public engagement'. Academia needs to demonstrate its value to society, not least because it is society that pays its salaries! This isn't difficult to do, in principle, in the case of linguistics, as interest in language is so universal, but it does take an outlay of time and energy that can be challenging to find. Engaging with the media is one important way, especially offering a corrective to mistaken ideas about language. Writing up accounts of research for the nonspecialist reader is another. And devising institutions that keep language (and thus linguistics) in the public eye and ear is a third.
This last point deserves further comment, as it's the area which has hitherto been least successful. How do fields such as natural history, science, and the arts maintain a public presence? One way is through museums, galleries, and exhibitions. London, for example, has a Science Museum, a Natural History Museum, and an array of art galleries. But it has no Language Museum (or House, or Gallery) – nor do most other cities. An exception is Washington DC, where Planet Word opened in October 2020. There have been no shortage of initiatives, such as the proposal for a World of Language proposal for London in the late 1990s19 and the Casa de les Llengues for Barcelona in the 2000s, but these have failed for a mixture of economic and political reasons. Similarly, proposals for a major language prize, comparable in status to Nobel prizes or Oscars, have never been taken up. I remain optimistic that the linguistic landscape of the 21st century will be enhanced by progress in such ways.
JLLT: Dear Professor Crystal, we feel very honoured and would like to express our sincere gratitude to you for giving us such an insightful interview. Your words have once again emphasised the significance of applied linguistics and the support it can provide to all of us who use language on a daily basis, often without awareness of its underlying rules and mechanisms. Thank you for this enlightening information. We wish you all the best and look forward to your upcoming projects and activities.
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Notes
1 Martin J Ball, David Crystal & Paul Fletcher (eds), Assessing Grammar: the Languages of LARSP (2011); Profiling Grammar: More Languages of LARSP (2016); Grammatical Profiles: Further Languages of LARSP (2019). all published by Multilngual Matters. See further below.
2 'Searchlinguistics', in the section 'Technology an Language' in The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics (Wiley, 2012). See further below.
3 See the listing at https://www.english-corpora.org.
4 See further my Internet Linguistics (Routledge, 2011), chapter 4.
5 R Tamagawa, C. Watson, I. H. Kuo, B. A. Macdonald & E. Broadbent, 'The effects of synthesized voice accents on user perceptions of robots', International Journal of Social Robotics 3(3), 2011, 253-62.
6 According to online sites such as https://whoseknowledge.org.
7 See K. L. Rehg & L. Campbell (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Endangered Languages (Oxford University Press, 2018); Eda Derhemi & Christopher Moseley (eds.), Endangered Languages in the 21st Century (Routledge, 2022).
8 See https://www.ogmios.org.
9 'I don't get it'. Researching the cultural lexicon of global Englishes. In Alexander Onysko (ed.), Research Developments in World Englishes (Bloomsbury, 2021), 173-98.
10 Naomi S. Baron, How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio. (Oxford University Press, 2021).
11 See my Language Play (Penguin, 1998, chapter 6; updated e-book edition 2013 on the Crystal Publishing page at www.davidcrystal.com
12 Roger Beard & Andrew Burrell, Language Play and Children’s Literacy (London Institute of Education Press, 2020).
13 An early account is B. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (ed.), Speech Play (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1976).
14 Think on my Words: Exploring Shakespeare's Language (Cambridge University Press, 2008), chapter 1.
15 Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech & Jan Svartvik, A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Longman, 1985).
16 David Crystal & Derek Davy, Investigating English Style (Longman, 1969).
17 See SiteScreen, as developed by adpepper media, 2006:
https://adpeppergroup.com/en/news-en/ad-pepper-media-deploys-revolutionary-site-screening-technology/
18 For example, Stephen Pihlaja (ed.) Analysing Religious Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
19 'A London language museum', Museum International 238, 2008, 80-87.
