The Internet offers endangered languages a chance to have a public voice in a way that would not have been possible before.
Enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history and a large part of its cultural identity. The world is a mosaic of visions. To lose even one piece of this mosaic is a loss for all of us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Language embodies a community's identity and history; losing a language means losing part of our shared cultural heritage.
David Crystal's quote emphasizes the profound connection between language, history, and cultural identity. He suggests that language not only serves as a means of communication but also encapsulates the experiences, traditions, and collective memories of a community. The metaphor of the world as a mosaic highlights how every unique language contributes to the overall richness of human experience; thus, losing even a single language diminishes our collective cultural landscape.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a discussion about cultural preservation, one might say, 'As David Crystal noted, enshrined in a language is the whole of a community's history.'
More from David Crystal
All quotes →The main effect of the Internet on language has been to increase the expressive richness of language, providing the language with a new set of communicative dimensions that haven't existed in the past.
Bilingualism lets you have your cake and eat it. The new language opens the doors to the best jobs in society; the old language allows you to keep your sense of 'who you are.' It preserves your identity. With two languages, you have the best of both worlds.
Language has no independent existence apart from the people who use it. It is not an end in itself; it is a means to an end of understanding who you are and what society is like.
Every usage, no matter how bizarre or nonstandard, fascinates me, as it tells me something about the way language is evolving.
Likewise, there is no evidence that texting teaches people to spell badly: rather, research shows that those kids who text frequently are more likely to be the most literate and the best spellers, because you have to know how to manipulate language.
Similar quotes
When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.
The reason I loved working at Boeing was because I loved the idea of air travel as a way of bringing people and cultures together - because when we come together as people and cultures, we realize that we are not that different after all, and when we realize that we are not that different after all, the world becomes a better place.
I feel that Italy's a country that's constantly looking out and constantly following what's happening in other cultural centers. What is being written in America, what is being published in England, what is being published in France. It's a culture that's always wanting to absorb and inform itself of other works, other writers, etc., etc.
Languages and cultures are disappearing at an enormously fast rate, and many of them are in Canada. These are extreme examples of removal of freedom of expression - to actually lose a language and the ability to express that culture.
A new culture can only grow up in the soil of a purged humanity.
Culture is public, because meaning is