David Crystal
Professor David Crystal, OBE (born 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, UK) is a linguist, academic and author. He grew up in Holyhead (North Wales), and Liverpool (England) where he attended St Mary's College from 1951. Crystal studied English at University College London between 1959 and 1962. He was a researcher under Randolph Quirk between 1962 and 1963, working on the Survey of English Usage. Since then he has lectured at the University of Wales, Bangor (UWB) and the University of Reading. He is currently an honorary professor and part-time lecturer of Linguistics at UWB. His many academic interests include ELT, forensic linguistics, language death, ludic linguistics (or language play), English style, Shakespeare, indexing, and lexicography. He is also a qualified speech therapist. David Crystal lives in Holyhead with his wife and four children, and, having retired from full-time academia, works as a writer, editor and consultant. He was awarded the OBE in 1995.
Crystal's Work
He is the author of over sixty books on a wide variety of subjects, specialising among other things in editing reference works, including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (1987), the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1995), the Cambridge Biographical Dictionary, the Cambridge Encyclopedia itself, and the New Penguin Encyclopedia (2003). He has also edited literary works, and is Chair of the UK National Literary Association. He also has a strong line in books for the layman about linguistics and the English language. His non-linguistic writing includes poems, plays and biography. A Roman Catholic by conviction (he was influential in a campaign to save Holyhead's convent from demolition, leading to the creation of the Ucheldre Centre), he writes devotional poetry and articles for the Catholic magazine The Tablet. He broadcasts frequently and for many years presented a BBC Radio 4 programme on language issues.
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