KNOT Magazine
Fall Issue 2022
An Exclusive Interview with Language Scholar,
Professor David Crystal by Editor Rachid Filali
Rachid Filali: You've written an important book about language and the Internet, is it possible that the electronic writing such as SMS (gr8-great) threatens the future of languages?
David Crystal: No. It forms only a tiny part of modern usage. Also, it's not as fashionable as it was when it first came in. Many teenagers in the UK no longer use it.
Rachid Filali: French Professor Claude Hagège, confirmed that the English language has become a danger to other languages, because a lot of people want to learn the language of Shakespeare and neglect learning the national languages?
David Crystal: It isn't just English. All powerful languages are a threat to smaller languages. There are endangered and extinct languages as a result of Chinese, Russian, Swahili, Arabic, French, Spanish, Portuguese... The important thing, of course, is to maintain local languages as an expression of identity alongside the learfning of an international language.
Rachid Filali: In English there are many Arabic words, do you know how many of these words, and could you give KNOT readers your evaluation on the status of the Arabic language at the moment?
David Crystal: The Oxford English Dictionary currently has 510 words that have Arabic as part of their etymology. I'm afraid I've never made a sociolinguistic study of Arabic, so can say nothing about its status.
Rachid Filali: There are researchers who say that the Arabic language is threatened with death soon, is this true?
David Crystal: I can't imagine why. Arabic is a very powerful language still, unified by the Classical Arabic of the Koran.
Rachid Filali: You are one of the largest specialists in Shakespeare, is it true that this poet has coined more than 1,700 English word, what do you think of those who claim that the poet did not write his plays, and the whole (37 plays) written by unknown authors?
David Crystal: Recent research suggests that the figure is much less than that - probably less than a thousand. But that is still an amazing figure.
I have no interest in the trend that began in the 19th century, and became a 20th century fad, suggesting that someone other than Shakespeare wrote the plays. All his contemporaries recognised him for who he was, and that's good enough for me.
Rachid Filali: Some researchers argue that Arabic is the language of literature and not the language of science and technology, in your opinion, does this analysis, reasonable and scientifically valid?
David Crystal: English is undoubtedly the primary language of science and technology, and has been since the 18th century. But of course other languages can talk about science just as efficiently. And many scientific terms come from Arabic anyway, such as algebra and algorithm - and of course, the numerals.
Rachid Filali: Why do Americans insist on spelling reforms, but the British do not want it?
David Crystal: There has only been one time when American English reformed its spelling, and that was through Noah Webster at the end of the 18th century, just after independence, when the new nation wanted to distance itself from Britain. No spelling reform movement has since succeeded anywhere else in the English-speaking world.
Rachid Filali: Professor you assume that English will be divided in the future, as has happened before to Latin, is this due to the wide spread of English in the world?
David Crystal: Yes. Some already talk of an English 'family of languages', as a result of developments such as T ok Pisin in Papua New Guinea.
Rachid Filali: You have a very productive scientific career, providing a valuable service to the English language, what is the secret of this great love?
David Crystal: The fact that languages are always changing. Whatever English is like today, it was different yesterday and will be different tomorrow. I talk about this at greater length in my autobiography, Just a Phrase I'm Going Through.
David works from his home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer, editor, lecturer, and broadcaster. Born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland in 1941, he spent his early years in Holyhead. His family moved to Liverpool in 1951, and he received his secondary schooling at St Mary’s College. He read English at University College London (1959-62), specialised in English language studies, did some research there at the Survey of English Usage under Randolph Quirk (1962-3), then joined academic life as a lecturer in linguistics, first at Bangor, then at Reading. He published the first of his 100 or so books in 1964, and became known chiefly for his research work in English language studies, in such fields as intonation and stylistics, and in the application of linguistics to religious, educational and clinical contexts, notably in the development of a range of linguistic profiling techniques for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. He held a chair at the University of Reading for 10 years, and is now Honorary Professor of Linguistics at the University of Wales, Bangor.
David Crystal’s authored works are mainly in the field of language, including several Penguin books, but he is perhaps best known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. Recent books include Words in Time and Place: Exploring Language through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary(2014), You Say Potato: a book about accents (2014, with actor son Ben Crystal), The Oxford Illustrated Shakespeare Dictionary (April 2015, also with Ben), and The Disappearing Dictionary: a treasury of lost English dialect words (May 2015). Other co-authored books include Words on Words (2000, a dictionary of language quotations compiled with his wife and business-partner, Hilary - Wheatley Medal, 2001), Wordsmiths and Warriors: the English-Language Tourist's Guide to Britain (2013, with Hilary), and Shakespeare’s Words (2002) and The Shakespeare Miscellany (2005), the last two in collaboration with Ben. Other Shakespeare work includes a regular article for the magazine of Shakespeare’s Globe, Around the Globe. Think On My Words, an introduction to Shakespeare’s language, appeared in 2008.
His books on English phonetics and phonology include Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English and The English Tone of Voice. His clinical books include Introduction to Language Pathology, Profiling Linguistic Disability, Clinical Linguistics, and Linguistic Encounters with Language Handicap. His work for schools includes the Skylarks, Databank, and Datasearch programmes, Nineties Knowledge, Language A to Z, Rediscover Grammar, Discover Grammar, and Making Sense of Grammar. His creative writing includes volumes of devotional poetry (Pilgrimage; Happenings); biographies of the Convent and of the Ucheldre Centre in Holyhead; a play, Living On, on the endangered languages theme; and he is currently editing the poetry of the African missionary John Bradburne. Performances include a dramatic reading of the St John Gospel, now available on CD.
He was founder-editor of the Journal of Child Language, Child Language Teaching and Therapy, and Linguistics Abstracts, and has edited several book series, such as Penguin Linguistics and Blackwell’s Language Library. In the 1980s, he became editor of general encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, along with their various abridged editions. In 1996 the database supporting these books came under the ownership of AND International Publishers, who began to develop the database for electronic media. As part of his consultancy work with this company, he devised a knowledge management system (the Global Data Model, or GDM) which allows electronic databases to be searched in a highly sophisticated way (UK and US patents). In 2001, both the database and the GDM became the property of a new company, called Crystal Reference Systems, with two divisions: Crystal Reference had as its primary aim the provision of reference data; Crystal Semantics, the provision of systems for document classification, Internet searching, contextual advertising, e-commerce, online security, and related areas. Products of the new regime included editions of The Penguin Encyclopedia (from 2002), The Penguin Factfinder (from 2003), and The Penguin Concise Encyclopedia (from 2003). Crystal Reference Systems was acquired by Adpepper Media in 2006, and he then switched roles to become director of research and development within the firm (to 2009). Adpepper closed the Crystal Reference division in 2008, and general encyclopedia publishing then ceased. He continued to act as a consultant to Adpepper on Internet applications until 2012.
David Crystal has been a consultant, contributor, or presenter on several radio and television programmes and series. These include The Story of English (BBC TV, 8 x 1 hour series 1986, consultant), The Story of English (radio version, 18 x 30-min series, BBC World Service, 1987, writer and presenter), several series on English for BBC Radio 4, Radio 5, and BBC Wales during the 1980s and 1990s (as writer and presenter), and The Routes of English (as consultant and contributor). Other television work includes Back to Babel (Infonation and Discovery Channel, 4 x 1-hour series, 2000, as consultant and continuity contributor), Blimey (BBC Knowledge, 3 x 1-hour series, 2001, as continuity contributor), The Routes of Welsh (BBC1, 6 x 30-min series, 2002, as consultant and contributor), The Way that We Say It (BBC Wales, 50-min, 2005, consultant and co-presenter), The Word on the Street (BBC1, 2005, 30 mins, as consultant), Voices of the World (Final Cut, 2005, as consultant and contributor), and several programmes for Open University television, beginning with Grammar Rules (1980, as writer and presenter). He was the consultant for the BBC Voices project in 2005 and was consultant for the British Library ‘Evolving English’ exhibition (November 2010 to April 2011), and author of the accompanying book.
David Crystal is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Association for Language Learning (ALL), president of the UK National Literacy Association, and an honorary vice-president of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, the Institute of Linguists, and the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. He is a past honorary president of the National Association for Professionals concerned with Language-Impaired Children, the International Association of Forensic Phonetics, and the Society of Indexers. He was Sam Wanamaker Fellow at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003-4 and was honorary president of the Johnson Society for 2005-6. He has also been a member of the Board of the British Council and of the English-Speaking Union. He received an OBE for services to the English language in 1995, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 2000. He now lives in Holyhead, where he is the director of the Ucheldre Centre, a multi-purpose arts and exhibition centre. He is married with four children.
("Biography" Librios, All Rights Reserved)
Rachid Filali was born in Algeria in 1964, and has been a journalist since 1985. Filali is a reseacher in linguitics, and is fluent in a number of languages: English, Arabic, French, German, Chinese, Japanese. He expressed his view about the universe and life in his first collection of poetry published in 2007. The second book published in 2014. In addition to these, he has published two books on world literature. He is also scientifically published in his study book about bees. Currently, he is collaborating with a number of Arab and foreign magazines and works as corrector and revisor for the newspaper Elkhabar-Elriadi.