Hi everyone ! In order to not let this start of blog articles-free, here is my version of David CRYSTAL's life. This because I'm quite interested in this old man talking about new technologies with the most old-fashioned beard I've ever seen. Indeed I didn't invent this bio, and you will surely find a lot of similitudes with another one if you have read the Wikipedia's one. ^^ Enjoy !David Crystal was born in 1941 in Northern Ireland. He grew up in Wales, and then in Liverpool. He studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He is currently an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, language death, "ludic linguistics" (Crystal's neologism for the study of language play), English style, Shakespeare, etc. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language. He has also served as an important editor for Cambridge University Press. Crystal became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. From 2001 to 2006, Crystal served as the Chairman of Crystal Reference Systems Limited, a provider of reference content and Internet search & advertising technology.
David Crystal has 4 children. His son Ben Crystal is also an author and co-authored 2 books with his father. Crystal himself is the author, co-author, or editor of over 120 books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including (as author) the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987, 1997, 2010) and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995, 2003), and (as editor) the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Factfinder, and the Cambridge Encyclopedia. He has also edited literary works, and is Patron of the UK National Literacy Association. He has also published several books for the general reader about linguistics and the English language, which use varied graphics and short essays to communicate technical material in an accessible manner.
Crystal hypothesises that globally English will both split and converge, with local variants becoming less mutually comprehensible and therefore necessitating the rise of what he terms World Standard Spoken English. In his 2004 book The Stories of English, a general history of the English language, he describes the value he sees in linguistic diversity and the according of respect to varieties of English generally considered "non-standard". He is a proponent of a new field of study, Internet linguistics.
His non-linguistic writing includes poems, plays and biography. A Roman Catholic by conviction, he has also written devotional poetry and articles. As an expert on the evolution of the English language, he was involved in the production of Shakespeare in the "Original Pronunciation" of the period in which he was writing. He coached actors on the appropriate pronunciation for the period. His book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (published in 2008) focused on text language and its impact on society. In 2009, he published his autobiographical memoir Just a Phrase I'm Going Through: My Life in Language.
Crystal continues to write as well as contribute to television and radio broadcasts. His association with the BBC ranges from, formerly, a BBC Radio 4 series on language issues to, currently, podcasts on the BBC World Service website for people learning English.
