Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.

Sending a message on a mobile phone is not the most natural of ways to communicate. The keypad isn't linguistically sensible.

It took three years to put Shakespeare's words together, there were a lot of words to be studied and a lot of words to be sorted out, and it proved to be a major project.

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.

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

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.

Swearing makes an excellent relief mechanism