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David Crystal
David Crystal (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist who studies the English language.
Crystal studied English at University College London and has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He was awarded an OBE in 1995 and a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2000. Crystal was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Lancaster University in 2013. Crystal is a proponent of Internet linguistics and has also been involved in Shakespeare productions, providing guidance on original pronunciation.
Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had been evacuated there during The Blitz. Before he reached the age of one, his parents separated. He remained estranged from and ignorant of his father for most of his childhood, but later learnt (through work contacts and a half-brother) of the life and career of Samuel Crystal in London, and of his half-Jewish heritage. He grew up with his mother in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England, where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. Crystal is a practising Roman Catholic.
He currently lives in Holyhead with his wife, Hilary, a former speech therapist and now children's author. He has four grown-up children. His son Ben Crystal is also an author, and has co-authored four books with his father.
Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962, and was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading and is an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor. Retired from full-time academia, he works as a writer, editor and consultant, and contributes to television and radio broadcasts. His association with the BBC ranges from, formerly, a BBC Radio 4 series on language issues to, more recently, podcasts on the BBC World Service website for people learning English.
Crystal was appointed OBE in 1995 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He is also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics, language death, "ludic linguistics" (Crystal's neologism for the study of language play), style, English genre, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), honorary president of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), and Patron of the UK National Literacy Association. He is a consultant for Babel - The Language Magazine, for which he has also written articles.
Crystal has authored, co-authored, and edited over 120 books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including (as author) the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, 1997, 2010) and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995, 2003, 2019), and (as editor) the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Factfinder, the Cambridge Encyclopedia, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003).
Crystal has also written plays and poetry. He has published several books for the general reader about linguistics and the English language, which use varied graphics and short essays to communicate technical material in an accessible manner. In his article "What is Standard English", Crystal hypothesises that, globally, English will both split and converge, with local variants becoming less mutually comprehensible and therefore necessitating the rise of what he terms World Standard Spoken English (see also International English).
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David Crystal
David Crystal (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist who studies the English language.
Crystal studied English at University College London and has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He was awarded an OBE in 1995 and a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2000. Crystal was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Lancaster University in 2013. Crystal is a proponent of Internet linguistics and has also been involved in Shakespeare productions, providing guidance on original pronunciation.
Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had been evacuated there during The Blitz. Before he reached the age of one, his parents separated. He remained estranged from and ignorant of his father for most of his childhood, but later learnt (through work contacts and a half-brother) of the life and career of Samuel Crystal in London, and of his half-Jewish heritage. He grew up with his mother in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England, where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. Crystal is a practising Roman Catholic.
He currently lives in Holyhead with his wife, Hilary, a former speech therapist and now children's author. He has four grown-up children. His son Ben Crystal is also an author, and has co-authored four books with his father.
Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962, and was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading and is an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor. Retired from full-time academia, he works as a writer, editor and consultant, and contributes to television and radio broadcasts. His association with the BBC ranges from, formerly, a BBC Radio 4 series on language issues to, more recently, podcasts on the BBC World Service website for people learning English.
Crystal was appointed OBE in 1995 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He is also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics, language death, "ludic linguistics" (Crystal's neologism for the study of language play), style, English genre, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), honorary president of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), and Patron of the UK National Literacy Association. He is a consultant for Babel - The Language Magazine, for which he has also written articles.
Crystal has authored, co-authored, and edited over 120 books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including (as author) the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, 1997, 2010) and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995, 2003, 2019), and (as editor) the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Factfinder, the Cambridge Encyclopedia, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003).
Crystal has also written plays and poetry. He has published several books for the general reader about linguistics and the English language, which use varied graphics and short essays to communicate technical material in an accessible manner. In his article "What is Standard English", Crystal hypothesises that, globally, English will both split and converge, with local variants becoming less mutually comprehensible and therefore necessitating the rise of what he terms World Standard Spoken English (see also International English).
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