Ten years later on: a slightly sentimental apotheosis, or /C_C

I did, however, occur to me that I’ve never mentioned a very pleasant occasion that took place near the end of last academic year – meeting the person who can most likely be credited with stirring up my interest in linguistics (that is, not simply ‘languages’) in the first place. That person is David Crystal. While quite unknown to anyone but English Language students back home in Czechia, in Britain Crystal is admittedly not a celebrity, but certainly a respected and known authority whose work people often become familiar with when still at school: be it through his books, which explain in simple terms the workings of language or the history of English, or at one of the many talks he still gives all over the country, despite being 75 years of age.

I once wrote on here that a grand ambition of mine would be to do for linguistics what David Attenborough has done for biology, but that was silly of me: to be the David Attenborough of linguistics is to be David Crystal. The most inspiring aspect of his writing for me is that despite targeting as wide an audience is possible, he refuses to break one of the basic tenets of modern linguistics, i.e. being descriptive, not prescriptive. When writing about English, he celebrates ‘non-standard’ dialects and the inventiveness of internet slang instead of praising the ‘purity’ of ‘proper’ English. In doing this, he manages to not only present in an accessible manner the highlights of the knowledge collected over more than a century of this scientific endeavour of ours, but also hopefully persuade the reader to appreciate the importance of linguistic diversity. He refuses to be a ‘language guru’ giving out advice on how to say things ‘correctly’. Such people are just as common in Britain as they are in Czechia (although there, sadly, they are more commonly found even amongst linguists), but tragically we have yet to find a person of Crystal’s academic calibre and sheer bravery who could counter-balance their rhetoric. But I’m really running off on a tangent now.

I wrote above that David Crystal can be credited with getting me interested in linguistics in the first place: this happened at Summer Film School about ten years ago (aye, 2007, I googled it). The main focus of the festival that year was Brazilian cinema, but there was a programme of Shakespearean adaptations too, with Crystal introducing the individual films. Shakespeare is one of his greatest academic and personal interests: he started, for example, the tradition of ‘original pronunciation’ performances at The Globe Theatre. At the festival, I happened to see him and his son perform a scene from his own play, entitled Living On, about the documentation of endangered languages. A linguist is trying to gain the trust of the last speaker of a dying tongue so that it may be preserved in some form for future generations. It was but a ten-minute excerpt, but we were told that we should contact David through his website if we were interested in reading the whole thing. I immediately did so, in my broken English, and sure enough received the play as an email attachment a couple of days later. Reading it, I kept thinking what a wonderful job this must be.

Now I know, of course, that there is more to linguistics than fieldwork, but it’s quite obvious that I’ve never lost interest in minority languages. And that’s exactly what I told David Crystal as I shook his hand after a lecture on internet linguistics he gave to a chock-full auditorium. I told him that I saw him perform a bit of Living On at a summer film festival, and that it’s probably what brought me to what I do now. He asked if I mean the festival in Uherské Hradiště. I told him that was the one, and he thanked me for reminding me of that lovely couple of days he spent there. I told him that I’m getting started on a dissertation on Scottish Gaelic, and he congratulated me. I apologised for being so sentimental and he signed my copy of one of his books for me. There were tens of people like me in that auditorium; it seemed that every single one of my colleagues had a David Crystal story. I apologise that mine is so unexciting. But I hope you can understand, dear benevolent reader, especially if you had experienced a moment like this, how beautiful it is to see with clarity the person you were ten years ago and feel that where you are now is where you wanted to be, without even planning your journey out in detail.

By this time, you surely must be fed up with this story; I suggest you open Crystal’s “How Language Works” instead, and be fascinated by the underappreciated beauty of language – humanity’s greatest non-invention.