David Crystal

David Crystal

David Crystal , OBE (born July 6, 1941 in Lisburn , Northern Ireland ) is a British linguist and author.

life and work

Crystal grew up in Holyhead and Liverpool . In Liverpool he attended St. Mary's College from 1951. Between 1959 and 1962 he studied English at University College London . Between 1962 and 1963 he worked for Randolph Quirk on the "Survey of English Usage". Since then he has taught at the University of Wales, Bangor (UWB) and the University of Reading . David Crystal lives in Holyhead with his wife and four children. His son Ben Crystal is an actor. In 1995 he was awarded the Order of the British Empire ( OBE ).

David Crystal is the author of over 60 books. He is one of the editors of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987) and the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995). He has written numerous generally understandable books on linguistics and linguistics. His many academic interests include English as a lingua franca , English lessons, forensic linguistics , Sprachentod , linguistics of humor, style , William Shakespeare , indexing, lexicography and language on the Internet. He has also published literary works such as poems, dramas and biographies. A staunch Catholic, he writes poems and articles for the Catholic magazine The Tablet . He chairs the UK National Literary Association and the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL). For several years he hosted a program on linguistic topics for BBC Radio 4. David Crystal was a co-founder of Crystal Semantics Limited.

Fonts (selection)

• Linguistics. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth et al. 1971, ISBN 0-14-021332-5 (In German: Introduction to Linguistics (= Kohlhammer-Urban-Taschenbücher. 182). Kohlhammer, Stuttgart et al. 1975, ISBN 3-17-001368-8 ) .
• The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 1987, ISBN 0-521-26438-3 (In German: Die Cambridge-Enzyklopädie der Sprache. Translation and editing of the German edition by Stefan Röhrich. Campus, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1993, ISBN 3-593 -34824-1 ).
• The Stories of English. Allen Lane, London et al. 2004, ISBN 0-7139-9752-4 .
• Pronouncing Shakespeare. The Globe Experiment. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge et al. 2005, ISBN 0-521-85213-7 .
• Txtng. The Gr8 Db8. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-954490-5 .
• Language and the Internet. 2nd Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2006, ISBN 978-0-52186859-4 .
• Begat. The King James Bible and the English Language. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2010, ISBN 978-0-19-958585-4 .
• A Little Book of Language. Yale University Press, New Haven CT et al. 2010, ISBN 978-0-300-15533-4 (In German: Das kleine Buch der Sprache. Translated from the English by Dagmar Mallett. Atlantik, Hamburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-455- 70011-4 ).
• The Story of English in 100 Words. Profile Books, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-84668-428-9 .
• Spell it out. The singular story of English Spelling. Profile Books, London 2012, ISBN 978-1-84668-567-5 .
• Shakespeare's original pronunciation. Speeches and Scenes performed as Shakespeare would have heard them. British Library, London 2012, ISBN 978-0-7123-5119-5 (audio CD with booklet).

Web links

• Literature by and about David Crystal in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about David Crystal  in the German Digital Library
• Crystals homepage