New Books In Language

In an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced and accessible introduction to general linguistics, there a lucid specialised textbook in an emerging field. With this memoir, Just a Phrase I’m Going Through: My Life in Language (Routledge, 2009), he fills another gap, and offers a vivid picture of the working life of a professional linguist. The book follows Crystal’s career across an enormous range of linguistic disciplines, from English usage through clinical linguistics and on into semantic Web indexing. It also describes the many other channels along which Crystal’s enthusiasm for language has run – reconstructing the speech sounds of Shakespeare for the stage, presenting the case for endangered languages, and doing battle with the forces of ‘linguistic purism’ on the radio. I talk with Crystal about his motivation for writing a memoir, the challenges of applied linguistics, and the unpredictable futur

Isn’t it odd how the golden age of correct language always seems to be around the time that its speaker was in high school, and that language has been going to the dogs ever since? Such is the anguish of declinists the world over, pushing the commercial success of language-bashing stocking fillers. But what’s the real reason that we get hung up on greengrocers’ apostrophes and the superiority of certain language forms over others? Robert Lane Greene‘s premise is that for those who hold up the standardised variety as the one true voice, the authority of the prestige language is not about words and rules, but about the perceived superiority of the people who use it. Hand-wringing over glottal stops and ‘ain’t’ contractions obscures attempts to define ‘us’ and distance ‘them’, and is a tool to support class, ethnic, or national prejudices. Lane’s new book You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws and the Politics of Identity (Delacorte Press, 2011) gives an overview of these traits and then focu