David Crystal
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Professor David Crystal, OBE (born 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, UK) is a linguist, academic and author. He grew up in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. He grew up bilingual in Welsh and English, which influenced his approach to language and education.
Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at the University of Wales, Bangor (UWB) and the University of Reading. He is currently an honorary professor and part-time lecturer of linguistics at UWB. His many academic interests include English language teaching, forensic linguistics, language death, ludic linguistics (or language play), English style, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is also a qualified speech therapist. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL).
David Crystal lives in Holyhead with his wife and four children, and, having retired from full-time academia, works as a writer, editor and consultant. He was awarded the OBE in 1995.
[edit] Work
Crystal is the author of over sixty books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987), the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Encyclopedia itself, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003). He has also edited literary works, and is Chair of the UK National Literary Association. He also has a strong line in books for the layman about linguistics and the English language, which use varied graphics and short essays to communicate technical material in an accessible manner. He 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. His non-linguistic writing includes poems, plays and biography. A Roman Catholic by conviction, he writes devotional poetry and articles for the Catholic magazine The Tablet.
Since 2001, he has been the president of Crystal Reference Systems Limited, a provider of reference content and Internet search and advertising technology. The company's products are based upon the patented Global Data Model, a complex semantic network that Crystal devised in the early 1980s and was adapted for use on the Internet in the mid 1990s.
He was influential in a campaign to save Holyhead's convent from demolition, leading to the creation of the Ucheldre Centre. Crystal continues to write as well as contribute to television and radio broadcasts and for many years presented a BBC Radio 4 programme on language issues.
