David Crystal's informative account of the rise of English as a global language explores the history, current status and potential of English as the international language of communication. This new edition of his classic work includes additional sections on the future of English as a world language, English on the Internet, and the possibility of an English "family" of languages. Footnotes, new tables, and a comprehensive bibliography reflect the expanded scope of the revised edition. An internationally renowned scholar in the field of language and linguistics, David Crystal received an Order of the British Empire in 1995 for his services to the English language. He is the author of several books with Cambridge, including Language and the Internet (2001), Language Death (2000), English as a Global Language (1997), Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1997), and Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995) as well as Words on Words (University of Chicago, 2000). First edition Hb (1997): 0-521-59247-X First edition Pb (1998): 0-521-62994-2

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist. In addition to explaining his concept of uncreative writing, which is also the name of his popular course at the University of Pennsylvania, Goldsmith reads the work of writers who have taken up this challenge. Examining a wide range of texts and techniques, including the use of Google searches to create poetry, the appropriation of courtroom testimony, and the possibility of robo-poetics, Goldsmith joins this recent work to practices that date back to the early twentieth century. Writers and artists such as Walter Benjamin, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Andy Warhol embodied an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text was just as important as the resultant text itself. By extending this tradition into the digital realm, uncreative writing offers new ways of thinking about identity and the making of meaning. -- Book Description

This is an enlightening tour of English spelling that untangles 'stationery' from 'stationary' - and explains why the 'i before e except after c' rule is so misleading. Why is there an 'h' in ghost? William Caxton, inventor of the printing press and his Flemish employees are to blame: without a dictionary or style guide to hand in fifteenth century Bruges, the typesetters simply spelled it the way it sounded to the foreign ears, and it stuck. Seventy-five percent of English spelling is regular but twenty-five percent is complicated, and in "Spell It Out", our foremost linguistics expert David Crystal extends a helping hand to the confused and curious alike. He unearths the stories behind the rogue words that confound us, and explains why these peculiarities entered the mainstream, in an epic journey taking in sixth century monks, French and Latin upstarts, the Industrial Revolution and the internet. By learning the history and the principles, Crystal shows how the spellings that break all the rules become easier to get right.

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: first, the emergence of English as the world's first truly global language; second, the crisis facing huge numbers of languages which are currently endangered or dying; and, third, 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.