It’s not often a linguistics book gets a review in Take a Break magazine, “the world’s number one true-life weekly”. But you should never underestimate the power of a moral panic. Back in 2003 a school teacher posted an exam essay he had been marking on the internet — because it had been written in txt spk.
Within days it had been picked up by the media and appeared in several tabloids. Here was conclusive proof that the “kidz” really had taken over the asylum. Academic standards were in freefall; no one could punctuate any more; no one could “spel” any more; the English language was screwed.
No matter that the essay was soon revealed to be a hoax. The myth was much more appealing than the truth and it gave otherwise sane people, such as Eats, Shoots and Leaves author Lynne Truss and the BBC Radio newsreader John Humphrys, carte blanche to cash in on everyone’s fears by writing knee-jerk defences of standard English in the face of threats that only ever existed in their imaginations. In fact texting was such a new phenomenon that there was no research-based evidence to prove anything much.
So David Crystal, the United Kingdom’s leading linguistic academic, decided to go looking for some facts and earlier this year txtng: the gr8 db8 (Oxford University Press), his rather more considered contribution to the argument, was published.
“Almost every basic principle that people hold about texting turns out to be misconceived. Misspelling isn’t universal: analysis shows that only 10% of words used in texts are misspelt. Nor are most texts sent by kids: 80% are sent by businesses and adults. Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language,” he says.
“If you can’t spell a word, then you don’t really know whether it’s cool to misspell it. Kids have a precise idea of context — none of those I have spoken to would dream of using text abbreviations in their exams. They know they would be marked down for it.”
Changing opinions is hard work, but Crystal is hopeful of converting the linguistic reactionaries. “I’ve had several reviews that started, ‘I picked up this book expecting to hate it, but to my surprise …’,” he says, “which is something of a rarity. Academics don’t normally manage to alter people’s way of thinking through their strength of argument.”
But whether he can is almost beside the point. What matters to him is that he’s laid down another marker in his lifelong campaign to promote the English language as a living, egalitarian medium, rather than as a relic to be preserved and revered.
“There is some evidence to suggest we’re becoming less obsessed with correct spelling,” he says, “but it’s far from a texting phenomenon.
“If you take a look at the Bullock Report of 1975 [which considered the teaching of language in the UK], you can see there were huge concerns even then that children were no longer being taught to spell and write properly.
“The reality is that people have always had a tremendous fear about the impact of new technology on language. When the printing press was first invented, people thought it was an instrument of the devil that would spawn unauthorised versions of the Bible. The telephone created fears of a breakdown in family life, with people no longer speaking directly to one another. And radio and television raised concerns about brainwashing. Text messaging is just the most recent focus of people’s anxiety; what people are really worried about is a new generation gaining control of what they see as their language.”
At its most basic, language is an expression of identity. How we speak is central to who we think we are and where we think we belong. And that goes a long way to explaining how language has held such a visceral grip on Crystal throughout his life.
Crystal says he became aware of differences in language while growing up in Anglesey, Wales, 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?'” You can’t help thinking that question marks about his own identity were just as influential. For Crystal didn’t get to know his father until he was almost 50.
Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, after his mother was evacuated there during World War II in 1941, but his parents separated before he was a year old and his mother took him back to Holyhead and brought him up on her own.
When he was 10 the first outlines of his father started to emerge when Crystal opened an official letter addressed to his mother and learned his father’s name was Samuel Crystal. But that was as far as his knowledge went, as his mother remained silent.
Some time in the mid-1960s he met an academic at a linguistics seminar at Leeds University who told him he knew a doctor called Samuel Crystal and asked if he could be related. Crystal was non-commital, though he suspected it had to be his father.
Several years later Crystal’s first son, Timmy, was born with a cleft palate and the doctors wanted to know if there was any family history of the condition. He asked his then wife to write to his father on his behalf, as he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “He wrote back to say no there wasn’t any family history, it was nice to hear from us, and he would be in touch,” Crystal says. “But he wasn’t.”
The next contact came about 15 years later, after one of his colleagues at Reading University in southern England told him he knew a Samuel Crystal who lived in London. Crystal asked him to hand his father a letter and two days later the phone rang. “We talked for a bit,” he says. “And we agreed that we should meet. But again, he never phoned. So this time I called him and spoke to his wife, who told me that he was ill and had been taken to hospital.”
That was that for another 10 years, until he was phoned by a man saying his name was Michael, they both had entries in Who’s Who, and he thought they had the same father.
“He was my half-brother,” Crystal says. “When I’d last spoken to my father, he had been so interested in me that I had forgotten to ask him anything about him.”
Through Michael, Crystal has finally got to colour in his picture of his father. It’s a process that’s taken the best part of half a century.
There was a time Crystal may have fancied a career as a musician but once he had graduated from high school and got a place at University College London he only ever had his eye on academia. Other students called him “prof” and after graduating he started work immediately as a researcher for his mentor, Randolph Quirk.
A couple of years later he was offered a job at Bangor University, but was later poached by Reading University and remained there for 20 years.
“It was the time of the draconian cuts in the UK’s higher education system by the Thatcher government and we were getting more and more squeezed.” So he quit academia, moved back to Anglesey and set himself up as an independent language consultant.
His output in the past 20 years has been prolific. He has authored or co-authored more than 100 books — he knocked off his best-selling 600-page epic, The Story of English, in less than three months — he’s edited several encyclopaedias, renovated a convent and turned it into a community arts centre, built an extension on to his extension to house a whole cottage industry of fellow researchers, developed databases for internet search engines, made countless radio and TV appearances and launched dozens of lesser projects I’m already too tired to mention.
And Crystal has no intention of letting up. “I love working,” he says. “And, much as people like Lynne Truss may not like it, language is always changing. So there will always be something to write about.” —