"Come Back, Dizzy" (p.187)
So This Is Depravity (1980)
“The only languages that do not change are dead ones.”
Source: How Language Works, 2007, p. 357
Context: However language began, one thing is certain – it immediately began to change, and has been changing ever since. Languages are always in a state of flux. Change affects the way people speak as inevitably as it does any other area of human life. Language purists do not welcome it, but they can do very little about it. Language would stand still only if society did. A world of unchanging linguistic excellence, based on the brilliance of earlier literary forms, exists only in fantasy. The only languages that do not change are dead ones.
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David Crystal 24
British linguist and writer 1941Related quotes

Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
Context: A dead language is not only one no longer spoken or written, it is unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis. Like statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance. However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story, fill baffling silences.

“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”
Source: La sombra del viento (The Shadow of the Wind) (2001)

“A scholar is like a book written in a dead language — it is not every one that can read in it.”
"Common Places," No. 13, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

“Things which do not grow and change are dead things.”
Source: How To Write A Sentence And How To Read One (2011), Chapter 4, What Is A Good Sentence?, p. 42