David Crystal Popular Books

David Crystal Biography & Facts

David Crystal, (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist who works on the linguistics of English language. Crystal studied English at University College London and has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading. He was awarded an OBE in 1995 and a Fellowship of the British Academy in 2000. Crystal is a proponent of Internet linguistics and has also been involved in Shakespeare productions, providing guidance on original pronunciation. Family Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had been evacuated there during The Blitz. Before he reached the age of one, his parents separated. He remained estranged from and ignorant of his father for most of his childhood, but later learnt (through work contacts and a half-brother) of the life and career of Samuel Crystal in London, and of his half-Jewish heritage. He grew up with his mother in Holyhead, North Wales, and Liverpool, England, where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. Crystal is a practising Roman Catholic.He currently lives in Holyhead with his wife, Hilary, a former speech therapist and now children's author. He has four grown-up children. His son Ben Crystal is also an author, and has co-authored four books with his father. Career Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962, and was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at Bangor University and the University of Reading and is an honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor. Retired from full-time academia, he works as a writer, editor and consultant, and contributes to television and radio broadcasts. His association with the BBC ranges from, formerly, a BBC Radio 4 series on language issues to, more recently, podcasts on the BBC World Service website for people learning English.Crystal was appointed OBE in 1995 and became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2000. He is also a Founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. His many academic interests include English language learning and teaching, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics, language death, "ludic linguistics" (Crystal's neologism for the study of language play), style, English genre, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is the Patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL), honorary president of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), and Patron of the UK National Literacy Association. He is a consultant for Babel - The Language Magazine, for which he has also written articles. Work Crystal has authored, co-authored, and edited 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, 2019), and (as editor) the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Factfinder, the Cambridge Encyclopedia, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003).Crystal has also written plays and poetry. He has 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. In his article "What is Standard English", 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 (see also International 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". In 2009 Routledge published his autobiographical memoir Just a Phrase I'm Going Through: My Life in Language, which was released simultaneously with a DVD of three of his lectures. His book Spell It Out: The Curious, Enthralling and Extraordinary Story of English Spelling (2013) explains why some English words are difficult to spell. His companion book, Making a Point: The Pernickety Story of English Punctuation came out in 2015 from Profile Books (UK) and St. Martin's Press (US). Crystal is a proponent of a new field of study, Internet linguistics, and has published Language and the Internet (2001) on the subject. Crystal's book Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (2008) focused on text language and its impact on society. He was one of the book series editors of The Language Library.From 2001 to 2006, Crystal served as the Chairman of Crystal Reference Systems Limited, a provider of reference content and Internet search and advertising technology. The company's iSense and Sitescreen 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. These include semantic targeting technology (marketed as iSense by ad pepper media) and brand protection technology (marketed as SiteScreen by Emediate ApS). The iSense technology is the subject of patents in the United Kingdom and the United States. After the company's acquisition by Ad Pepper Media N.V., he remained on the board as its R&D director until 2009.Crystal was influential in a campaign to save Holyhead's convent from demolition, leading to the creation of the Ucheldre Centre. Involvement in Shakespeare productions As an expert on the evolution of the English language, he was involved in the production of Shakespeare at Shakespeare's Globe in 2004 and 2005 in the "Original Pronunciation" of the period in which he was writing, coaching the actors on the appropriate pronunciation for the period, and has since been the consultant for several other Shakespeare plays performed in OP, including A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, Macbeth, Pericles, The Merchant of Venice, and Henry V. Bibliography Books Crystal, David and Quirk, Randolph (1964). Systems of Prosodic and Paralinguistic Features in English. The Hague: Mouton. Crystal, David (1965). Linguistics, Language and Religion. London: Burns & Oates. Crystal, David (1968). What is Linguistics?. London: Edward Arnold. Crystal, David and Davy, Derek (1969). Investigating English Style. London: Longman. Crystal, David and Boulton, W.F. (eds.) (1969). The English Language: Essays by Linguists and Men of Letters, Vol. 2 1858-1964. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (1969). Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (1971). Linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Crystal, David and Davy, Derek (1975). Advanced Conversational English. London: Longman. Crystal, David (1975). The English Tone of Voice: Essays in Intonation, Prosody and Paralanguage.... Discover the David Crystal popular books. Find the top 100 most popular David Crystal books.

Best Seller David Crystal Books of 2024

  • Horrible Words synopsis, comments

    Horrible Words

    Rebecca Gowers

    Nothing inflames the language gripers like a misplaced disinterested, an illogical irregardless, a hideous operationalisation. To purists these are 'howlers' and 'nonwords', fit on...

  • CenterStage synopsis, comments

    CenterStage

    Michael Kay

    From the longtime host of the New York Yankees’ television broadcasts, ESPN Radio’s The Michael Kay Show, and YES Network’s Emmy Award–winning CenterStage comes an “entertaining…gr...

  • Plays synopsis, comments

    Plays

    Anton Chekhov & Peter Carson

    At a time when the Russian theatre was dominated by formulaic melodramas and farces, Chekhov created a new sort of drama that laid bare the everyday lives, loves and yearnings of o...

  • Crystal Gorge synopsis, comments

    Crystal Gorge

    David Eddings & Leigh Eddings

    After two devastating defeats and the utter annihilation of two armies, the hideous Vlagh still vows to invade the land of Dhrall. A voracious insectile overmind, she can breed mil...

  • Susan Hill synopsis, comments

    Susan Hill

    Jonathan Noakes & Margaret Reynolds

    The Woman in Black, Strange Meeting, I'm the King of the Castle, A Little Bit of Singing and DancingIn Vintage Living Texts, teachers and students will find the essential guide...

  • A Waxing Moon synopsis, comments

    A Waxing Moon

    Roger Hutchinson

    Thirty years ago, the Gaelic language and culture which had been eminent in Scotland for 1,300 years seemed to be in the final stages of a 200year terminal decline. The number of G...

  • Sociolinguistics synopsis, comments

    Sociolinguistics

    Peter Trudgill

    This is a classic book on a fascinating subject. Peter Trudgill examines the close link between language and society and the many factors that influence the way we speak. These ran...

  • Breaking Bailey synopsis, comments

    Breaking Bailey

    Anonymous

    In the tradition of Go Ask Alice and Lucy in the Sky, this heartwrenching story chronicles a girl’s fatal experience with testing her moral limits and the dangers of addiction.Bail...

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    Totally Frank

    Frank McGarvey & Ronnie Esplin

    During a glorious but controversial career, Frank McGarvey won every major trophy in Scottish football. Under Alex Ferguson at St Mirren in the 1970s, he inspired a young Saints te...

  • Plain Words synopsis, comments

    Plain Words

    Rebecca Gowers & Ernest Gowers

    'Be short, be simple, be human.'When Sir Ernest Gowers first wrote Plain Words, it was intended simply as a guide to the proper use of English for the Civil Service. Within a year,...

  • Go Ask Alice synopsis, comments

    Go Ask Alice

    Anonymous

    A teen plunges into a downward spiral of addiction in this classic cautionary tale.January 24th After you’ve had it, there isn't even life without drugs…It started when she was ser...

  • I Must Say synopsis, comments

    I Must Say

    Martin Short

    In this engagingly witty, wise, and heartfelt memoir, Martin Short tells the tale of how a showbizobsessed kid from Canada transformed himself into one of Hollywood's favorite funn...

  • From Saturday Night to Sunday Night synopsis, comments

    From Saturday Night to Sunday Night

    Dick Ebersol

    A memoir by the legendary television executive detailing his pioneering work on Saturday Night Live, Sunday Night Football, the Olympics, the NBA, music videos, late night, and mor...

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    The World According to Razor

    Neil "Razor" Ruddock

    'If you were expecting to read Razor's views on politics then you're going to be disappointed. Anybody who wants to read that needs help! This is yours truly talking about some of ...

  • Gealach an Fhais synopsis, comments

    Gealach an Fhais

    Roger Hutchinson

    Bho chionn deich bliadhna fichead, bha cnan agus cultar na Gidhlig, a bha air a bhith iomraiteach ann an Alba airson 1,300 bliadhna, a rir coltais ann an ceumannan deireannach cron...

  • The Bilingual Brain synopsis, comments

    The Bilingual Brain

    Albert Costa

    'Fascinating. . . This engaging book explores just how multiple languages are acquired and sorted out by the brain. . . Costa's work derives from a great fund of knowledge, conside...

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    Kick the Bucket and Swing the Cat

    Alex Games

    Kick the Bucket and Swing the Cat takes a humorous tour through the fascinating, sometimes tragic, and often surprising history of the English language and its etymology. Author, h...

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    Laughing Legends

    Jeffrey Gurian, Richie Tienken & Chris Rock

    Once in a lifetime a venue comes along that changes show business dramatically, that fosters growth and camaraderie, experimentation and freedom. The Comic Strip is one of those pl...

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    Crystal

    Katie Price

    A glittering and sexy story of passion and betrayal and one woman's search for true love.Crystal is beautiful, talented and ambitious. All her life she has dreamed of making it as ...

  • Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah synopsis, comments

    Iphigenia, Phaedra, Athaliah

    Jean Racine & John Cairncross

    Strongly influenced by Classical drama, Jean Racine (163999) broke away from the grandiose theatricality of baroque drama to create works of intense psychological realism, with cha...

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    The Magic Word

    Jennifer Fallon

    From this internationally bestselling author, a wonderful story set in the world of Medalon and the Demon Child trilogy. A fabulous story of what happens when certain worlds collid...

  • Until Proven Innocent synopsis, comments

    Until Proven Innocent

    Stuart Taylor, Jr. & K. C. Johnson

    What began that night shocked Duke University and Durham, North Carolina. And it continues to captivate the nation: the Duke lacrosse team members‘ alleged rape of an African...

  • A Load of Balls synopsis, comments

    A Load of Balls

    John Scally

    As former England striker and television pundit Jimmy Greaves famously said, football is 'a funny old game'. In A Load of Balls: Football's Funny Side, John Scally confirms the tru...

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    Win Me Something

    Kyle Lucia Wu

    A NPR, Electric Lit, and Entropy Best Book of the YearA Washington Post, Shondaland, NPR Books, Parade, Lit Hub, PureWow, Harper’s Bazaar, PopSugar, NYLON, Alta, Ms. Maga...

  • Man, Interrupted synopsis, comments

    Man, Interrupted

    James Bailey

    James Bailey's form of obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD) was as bizarre as it was unbearable. He was obsessed by a fear of drugs and their effects, believing himself to be in cons...

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    Cosby

    Mark Whitaker

    The first major biography of an American icon, comedian Bill Cosby. Based on extensive research and indepth interviews with Cosby and more than sixty of his closest friends and ass...

  • Mr Gum and the Power Crystals synopsis, comments

    Mr Gum and the Power Crystals

    Andy Stanton

    Shabba me whiskers! It’s one of those Mr Gum books by Andy Stanton. They’re only the craziest, funnest most amazing books for children in the world.Mr Gum and the Power Crystals Ca...