While dozens of other experts have been bemoaning a decline in standards of English and blaming the arrival of text messaging, the linguist has been ploughing an altogether more optimistic furrow.

Mobile phones, he says, have not dulled the senses of a generation. If anything the hundreds of messages they send each week have sharpened their use of the English language.

It's the kind of talk likely to spur traditionalists into a fury of letter writing, each I carefully dotted, each T perfectly crossed. Professor Crystal, however, remains unrepentant.

"Ever since the arrival of printing, people have been arguing that new technology would have disastrous consequences for language,"
he says.

"There is a huge mythology surrounding the whole business of texting. People automatically assume it's having an adverse impact on literacy. The fact is that all the research shows that the opposite is true.

"Children could not be good at texting if they had not already developed literary awareness."

But what about the prevalence of annoying abbreviations and the complete absence of grammar? Surely neither can be good for the development of a language which relies on rules developed long before the technological assault on communication.

"If you analyse a large quantity of texts what you find is only about 10 per cent of the words used are abbreviations," says Prof Crystal, who tomorrow will be discussing his book GR8 TXT DB8 at the Humber Mouth festival. "You do get some people who only write in abbreviations, but that's not the norm. There are about as many teenagers who only use abbreviations as there are teenagers who always wear hoodies.

"A recent study from a team at Coventry University also showed that the more abbreviations pre-teenage children used, the higher they scored in reading and vocabulary tests.

"You can't leave letters out if you don't know how to spell in the first place and, by and large, children know when it is and isn't appropriate to use abbreviations.

"A few years ago there were reports a teenager had written an essay so full of text speak her teacher was unable to understand it. An extract was posted on the internet and the story was quoted incessantly, but no-one ever tracked down the entire essay or who had written it, and my feeling is it was probably a hoax.

"Texting, like anything, is subject to fashion. If you ask children why they use abbreviations they will often say 'because all my friends do', but often when they get into their later teens they'll say, 'Oh I used to do that when I was 13, but not any more'."

While texting is very much a modern phenomenon, it's not the first time the English language has adapted to suit particular needs.

"Yes texting is more colloquial and more elliptical than formal written English, but the words have developed to fit the method of communication. If you only have 160 characters, you need to get to the point quickly. Texting is never going to be any use to conduct a philosophical debate.

"We really ought to be more relaxed about the whole issue. There is a lot of talk about the need to preserve standard written English and that's true. Without the correct use of grammar and spelling, it becomes more difficult to communicate not just with people in our own country, but with English speakers abroad.

"However, 96 per cent of spoken English is already non-standard and throughout history writers like Sir Walter Scott and Emily Brontë have used dialect in their books without too much problem."

According to Prof Crystal, not only has the death of the English language been greatly exaggerated, but the creative potential of texting has been completely overlooked.

"A number of competitions have been run to find the best text poem and novel and within the constraints of texting there have been some really wonderful results. When I launched the book there was a lot of scepticism, but various critics wrote to say the book had changed their mind about the value and impact of texting.

"I can only compare it to people who say 'I don't like flying because aeroplanes always crash.' When you present them with the actual statistics they are forced to rethink.

"The truth is we won't see a generation of adults unable to write proper English, and the language as a whole is not in decline. In texting, what we are seeing, in a small way, is language in evolution."