Excerpts from his speech:
"English has become a tool to get a job done, and a standard that ensures mutual intelligibility", David Crystal said, to a gathered crowd of intellectuals and scholars from the Teaching community of Chennai.
David Crystal spoke about three revolutions that have impacted the English language in the last ten years:
1. First of all, the emergence of a global language, a phenomenon wherein English has diversified into as many forms as the countries it is spoken in.
2. The second revolution, according to Crystal, that greatly affected the world today, was the language crisis. "Half of the 6,000 languages in the world will be seriously endangered or are likely to die out in the course of this century", he lamented. That means, one language is dying out every 2 weeks!" Reeling out statistics to authenticate his claim he said that, "96 per cent of the languages in the world are spoken by only 4 per cent of the population."
3. The third development in the revolutionising of language, was the advent of electronic communication, opined Crystal. In 1997, English comprised 80 per cent of the total content on the Web. In 2000, it was 70 per cent and for the first time in 2004, it fell to below 50 per cent."
For Language Enthusiasts, he had this to say: (Excerpts):
Wright wrote a novel without any word containing the letter 'e', a challenge indeed.
Making a sentence where every word has the same vowel in it, can be quite a challenge. You can write a story in which every word of the story startswith the same letter. Every word, for example, should start with the letter 'a'.
He also read out the first chapter of Genesis in "The Bible" using the same parameters - all words starting with the letter 'a', much to the delight and applause of the audience.
"You are paid for playing with language, and advertising - SLOGANS - are the new punchy expressions of today," said. In one news report in a prestigious newspaper, it was reported in the Sports Column: 'Pain stops Play' Unless you are a part of the culture, you cannot understand it. The real professionals in language play are the poets and dramatists etc. according to Crystal. Any function that literature has can be conveyed beautifully through a play on language.
"Thus, Literature is the most sophisticated use of language that we have," opined the great scholar of our times.
Language teaching should be a humanizing experience, and if it isn't, then it is a waste! The closeness of language to literature can be illustrated through a game. You can have a conversation wherein every sentence has to be in a question form.
Show the use of adverbials like 'fortunately, although, sadly, however, frankly, etc and words that link phrases and clauses together, and on the over-used word 'and'!
He then spoke on the issue of Cultural Specificity in Language Play. Like for example, in Japan there's a reluctance to express one's feelings in public.
He focussed on how word play enhances language acquisition in the L2 context.
We round our lips only on three occasions, according to Crystal.
Firstly, for baby talk (which he mimics to a bemused crowd)
Secondly, Animals, and
Thirdly, with your most intimate associate! (here, his enunciation had the audience in splits!)
The ethos of the classroom should be a playful one, opined Crystal.
To conclude, Prof Crystal said that, ‘‘The future of Indian English is the future of Indian power. After the US, India is the only country that can command the field of Information Technology. That will come from their power over Indian English’’. Signs of which, he says, are now all over the place!"
And that remark indeed augurs well for Indian English!
[PS: The scanned image is an autographed paper for the writer of this blog post! by the great David Crystal. Really a memorable lecture and autograph too!] :-)