Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development

Several of us linguists at that time would record our own kids, just to get some data. There was some literature on it then, but no day-by-day, blow-by-blow examples. I recorded all my children over the years in some shape or form. It's what linguists do. You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.

English has been this vacuum cleaner of a language, because of its history meeting up with the Romans and then the Danes, the Vikings and then the French and then the Renaissance with all the Latin and Greek and Hebrew in the background.

The internet is an amazing medium for languages.

The story of English spelling is the story of thousands of people - some well-known, most totally unknown - who left a permanent linguistic fingerprint on our orthography.

Academics don't normally manage to alter people's way of thinking through their strength of argument.

You don't talk to a linguist without having what you say taken down and used in evidence against you at some point in time.