The triumphant concluding volume in David Crystal's classic trilogy on the English language combines the first history of English punctuation with a complete guide on how to use it.

Sounds Appealing tells us exactly why, and how, we pronounce words as we do. Pronunciation is integral to communication, and is tailored to meet the demands of the two main forces behind language: intelligibility and identity.

In this fascinating survey of everything from how sounds become speech to how names work, David Crystal answers every question you might ever have had about the nuts and bolts of language in his usual highly illuminating way.

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 ...

This new edition is approximately 20 per cent larger in coverage than the previous edition. This is a completely revised and updated edition of the Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics.

This book takes a long hard look at the text-messaging phenomenon and its effects on literacy, language, and society.

In the core analysis of the book, Crystal offers an extended and close dissection of Barack Obama’s electrifying “Yes we can” speech of 2008, in which the president demonstrated full mastery of virtually every element of ...

In this book, David Crystal confronts the foe of many : grammar.

Banter, chit-chat, gossip, natter, tete-a-tete: these are just a few of the terms for the varied ways in which we interact with one another through conversation.