Talk:David Crystal

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Changed "President of IATEFL" to the correct "Patron of IATEFL" - check iatefl.org to see that this is correct.

Elekmathe 06:50, 13 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Surname

Isn't Crystal an unusual surname? What is the origin? --84.20.17.84 09:19, 3 July 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Quote about nations

He writes: "All the big trouble spots of the world in recent decades have been monolingual countries—Cambodia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Burundi, Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland." (in Death of Language, Prospect, November 1999)

Is this quote right? I raise this point because it is so clearly inaccurate that I cannot understand why a linguist as respected as David Crystal would say it. Yugoslavia had three official languages: Slovenian, Serbo-Croat and Macedonian. According to the wiki-category Languages of Rwanda, that was not monolingual either.

I think that this quote needs to be double-checked, and perhaps some extra information should be added to it. He might be quoted out of context here somehow Epa101 (talk) 17:48, 28 August 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I have removed this as no-one replied. It did not fit in with the article at all, and I have my doubts that Crystal ever said this. Epa101 (talk) 10:57, 7 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]

It's on page 27 in Language Death, I've just found out. He was misquoted here. There was no mention of Yugoslavia or Northern Ireland originally. (Northern Ireland is largely monolingual actually, but Yugoslavia was certainly not) Crystal was writing about why we should care that languages are dying, and was arguing against the position that linguistic diversity leads to conflict. I don't think that this is a big enough issue to restore to the article. Does anyone disagree? Epa101 (talk) 20:04, 4 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Bilingual English/Welsh

I removed a sentence stating that DC grew up bilingual following the following article in the guardian [1]. This paragraph is the justification: "Crystal says he became aware of differences in language while growing up in Anglesey and listening to Welsh being spoken. "Neither my mother nor I spoke Welsh," he says, "but my uncle Joe did, and I can remember thinking, 'How come I can understand what she is saying and I can't understand what he is saying?'"

Of course, he lives in Anglesey and is a linguist, so he may well have learnt Welsh since... but it appears that he didn't grow up bilingual--Pysproblem (talk) 08:30, 17 September 2008 (UTC)[reply]