 Hello to all of you and welcome to our Five Reasons video series. Today I would like to give you five reasons for doing linguistics. And just in case you wouldn't believe me, I have someone with me here who will not only argue much better than me, but in fact he will do it better than anyone else. He's the world's most popular linguist, one of my former teachers, David Crystal. Welcome, David. Hello, nice to see you. Hello everybody. So, I don't think I have to introduce David Crystal. Just google his name and you will find that he has written more linguistic books and articles than anyone else, and that he's been part of many TV and radio programs. Alternatively, of course, you can consult his website. Here it is, David. That's your website. That's it. Okay. Now, David, before we talk about the five reasons for doing linguistics, let me ask you a personal question. What was your motivation to become a linguist? Oh, well, I think the answer is what's your motivation to get interested in languages and language generally? And in my case, it was growing up in a multilingual environment. So, I grew up in North Wales and that was at a time when Welsh was widely spoken in the town and English too, of course, and also Irish Gaelic too. And I was a monolingual family. My mum didn't speak any Welsh, but my uncle Joe did and the people on the street did. So, I was curious from a very early age, why do I understand you, but I don't understand you? And that's one of the motivations, I think, for wanting to know about languages and eventually studying them. And you can speak Welsh? Oh, yeah, I speak Welsh. And can you greet our audience in Welsh? Well, Borydda Chigid, good morning to you all. Well, Borydda, well, it depends when they're watching. You know, Pnoundar, good afternoon, you know. Okay. Thank you very much. I understand. So, knowing your personal reason, David, for becoming a linguist, I'll discuss your five points for actually doing linguistics. You told me that linguistics is fascinating. Why? Yes. Well, I started to write down all these reasons and I got page after page after page after page of stuff. There are so many reasons, but the fascinating one is the thing. You know, I've never met anybody who hasn't got an interest in language. You know, everybody finds language fascinating now. Which aspect of language do they find fascinating? Everybody is interested in place names. Where does that name of their town come from? Or their personal names? Or they're interested in some accent or some dialect or some usage? I've never met anybody who isn't interested in that. How children learn to speak, all of this. And the other thing is that you never get bored when you have that kind of interest because language is always changing. Whatever English, German was like yesterday, it's different today, it will be different tomorrow. So there is a kind of infinite set of possibilities of exploration that come with language study and that's why I find it particularly fascinating. I fully agree with you and fascination often means fun, doesn't it? Absolutely. But it's a lot of fun doing linguistics. Well, it is because language is for everybody. I mean, if you're interested in people, you have to be interested in language. And vice versa, interested in language leads you to be interested in people. So when you're studying language in the broadest way possible, you're meeting every conceivable type of person and every conceivable type of situation because language is always there. So in the course of my linguistic career, I've met novelists and poets and actors and producers and directors and film stars and all the rest of it. This is fun, you know. And even if you're only studying aspects of there, even linguists I've met, you see. And all human life is there, they used to say, about one of the newspapers in Britain. And I think when you're studying language, you're studying all aspects of humanity in this kind of fun sort of way. I fully agree with you and I share your view. I have always enjoyed this, for example, dealing with speech sounds, with unknown languages. So can linguistics also be useful to us? Well, I think this is one of the most important domains, actually. We're talking applied linguistics now rather than linguistics, but the useful side of language study is something that's shaped my career more possibly than anything else. It usually starts with a phone call, somebody rings you up or an email these days and says, you know, I've got a problem, can you help? So this was one of the motivations for developing the whole domain of clinical linguistic work where you're trying to help children who have problems with language or adults too, who have problems with language, try using your linguistic expertise to improve the quality of their lives. One of the big motivations about English language teaching, of course, is to improve methods of teaching so that people can learn languages more efficiently. And computers? Well, the whole computational side of things, very critical now in that domain. And then a very specific area like forensic linguistics, you know, the fact that you can use your linguistics in order to help people solve crimes, effectively, in the broadest sense of the word. There are so many areas where it's useful. And I think this is one of the most rewarding aspects of the whole business. But it's also a challenge, isn't it? So it's a huge challenge for someone being a linguist to deal with all these things. And so why is linguistic challenging as well? Well, it's challenging because, remember, this is linguistics. We're talking about all human languages here. The whole aim of linguistics is to understand the language faculty as it were. What is it that we've got in our brains, in our lives, in our behavior, in our ways of thinking that language actually manifests, motivates, and all languages are part of the business. So, you know, we're talking about somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 languages here. They all need to be studied. Each language expresses a vision of the world. All languages are different. No language translates perfectly into any other language. So this is the most challenging thing, it seems to me, to try and understand what all languages have in common, hence general linguistics and the generalizations about universals that people like to make. And yet at the same time, not to lose sight of the way, languages are different in the individual ways in which they express the vision of what it means to be human. And there is no greater question than that, it seems to me. What does it mean to be human? And linguistics provides one of the best answers to that. Okay, so you mentioned four reasons now already. There's one thing left. Looking at you, you wrote a large number of books. Is linguistics also profitable? Oh, profitable. Well, I think it certainly is. Now, for those of you out there who immediately say, well, I haven't made my fortune out of linguistics, this is what I want to say to you, that things are about to change. Yes, it has been difficult to make a living out of linguistics. Applied linguistics a bit easier. I know some very well-off people who have made a career out of forensic linguistics, for example, charging good fees, you know, for what they do. I know some foreign language teacher, teaching experts who travel the world and their books sell in hundreds of thousands. So, you know, there have been traditions where you can make a respectable career out of it. But things are about to change because it's the internet now and the technology that is offering opportunities to linguists like never before. I mean, every aspect of the internet requires a linguistic perspective. And when you think about what's going to happen, speech to text, text to speech, automatic translation, all of these issues, why is automatic translation at the moment still pretty pathetic? It's getting better, but why is it still pretty poor? Statistics? Because the algorithms are so naive and they need to be made sophisticated. Their semantics needs to be more sophisticated. The pragmatics needs to be. Who's going to do that? Well, it's got to be linguists. And in the technology world and in the internet world, these are some of the careers which are opening up now. One can make a fair bit of money, it seems to me, by developing new types of linguistically sophisticated software and all the rest of it. I think there are opportunities here like we've never seen before. Yes. Okay, David, as far as we know, you could go on for ages and we could listen to you endlessly, but we have to stop here because our policy is to be short and concise. So this is why we confine ourselves to just five reasons. So on behalf of all our viewers, let me thank you very much for having been with us. And goodbye to all of you. All the best to your future. Thanks very much again. Thank you, everybody.