Here's a message from Sylvia about the Routledge David Crystal lectures:
Today we (Sylvia and a group of students from the ‘Language and Society’ module) went to see David Crystal giving three lectures at the Shaw Theatre, next to the British Library in King’s Cross.
His first lecture entitled ‘The Future of Englishes’ was an interesting and informative overview of the past, present and future of English as a global language. He is an incredibly engaging speaker, and from the outset it was easy to see why these lectures had been billed as ‘performance lectures’. Crystal managed to enliven his examples and anecdotes with entertaining impressions of the people being discussed. He would move to one side of the stage to act being one speaker, and then move back to enact the other side of the conversation. Amazingly, he did this without a podium, props, notes or audio-visual equipment. Lecturers of the world take note!
The second lecture on ‘Language Death’ contained some really fascinating examples, such as the legend of 18th Century explorer Alexander von Humboldt’s parrots who were the last surviving speakers of a language called ‘Maypure’, and the artist Rachel Berwick’s attempts to teach Maypure to parrots in 2002, using only Humboldt’s 200 year old notes. See:
http://www.parrotchronicles.com/septoct2002/maypore.htm
Crystal is obviously passionate about the topic of Language Death and this was clear when the lecture took a surprising turn. Having stated that people are affected more by art than by academics writing books, Crystal proceeded to enact a scene from a play he had written about a ‘last speaker’ of a language. He was joined on stage by his son, Ben Crystal, and another actor. Together they enacted a scene between a linguist, the last speaker, and a British Council official. In the scene the last speaker is trying to explain that he no longer wants his stories recorded as the linguist’s data. The last speaker finishes his explanation by asking ‘who will tell the stories to me?’. The cultural value and emotional price of the loss of a language was strongly conveyed. I was really impressed by the sheer talent of a performer who can successfully carry off such a risky transition from giving a serious lecture to enacting the scene from a play (and back again).
Unfortunately I had to leave before the last lecture on ‘Internet linguistics’, but I came away feeling both entertained and informed.
Sylvia
