Author: David Crystal
Publisher: Foundation Books
Year: 2005
Language: English
Pages: 142
ISBN/UPC (if available): 074563480X
Description
We are living through the consequences of a linguistic revolution. Dramatic linguistic change has left us at the beginning of a new era in the evolution of human language, with repercussions for many individual languages.
In this book, David Crystal, one of the world’s authorities on language, brings together for the first time the three major trends which he argues have fundamentally altered the world’s linguistic ecology: the emergence of English as the world’s first truly global
language; the crisis facing huge numbers of languages which are currently endangered or dying; and finally, the radical effect on language of the arrival of internet technology.
Examining the interrelationships between these topics, Crystal encounters a vision of a linguistic future which is radically different from what has existed in the past, and which will make us revise many cherished concepts relating to the way we think about and work with languages. Everyone is affected by this linguistic revolution.
The Language Revolution will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication in the twenty-first century.
REVIEWS
This is the first book to deal with the really important question of what to do next? After the rise of English, the endangerment of minoritized languages the world over and the web’s tilt toward where the money is, what can we who treasure diversity as the real human (and humanizing) condition do about the continued and accelerating demise of scores of languages every month? Crystal is a master of simplifying (but not oversimplifying) the difficult, as well as of involving the reader in ideas and efforts that go beyond the status quo and good intensions. Three cheers for more of the same!
-Joshua A Fishman, Yeshiva University, Standford University and New York University
A helpful compact overview of global language trends and their relationship to one another.
-Jean Aitchison, University of Oxford
Contents
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION: A New Linguistic World
The Future of Englishes
The Future of Languages
The Role of the Internet
After the Revolution
Language Themes for the Twenty-First Century
NOTES
INDEX