Saving Language Reading Answers - IELTS Reading Practice Test

For the first time, linguists have put a price on language. Saving a language from extinction isn’t cheap, but more and more people are arguing that the alternative is the death of communities.
A. There is nothing unusual about a single language dying. Communities have come and gone throughout history, and with them, their language. But what is happening today is extraordinary, judged by the standards of the past. It is language extinction on a massive scale. According to the best estimates, there are some 6,000 languages in the world. Of these, about half are going to die out in the course of the next century: that’s 3,000 languages in 1,200 months. On average, there is a language dying out somewhere in the world every two weeks or so.

B. How do we know? In the course of the past two or three decades, linguists all over the world have been gathering comparative data. If they find a language with just a few speakers left, and nobody is bothering to pass the language on to the children, they conclude that language is bound to die out soon. And we have to draw the same conclusion if a language has less than 100 speakers. It is not likely to last very long. A 1999 survey shows that 97 per cent of the world’s languages are spoken by just four per cent of the people.

C. It is too late to do anything to help many languages when the speakers are too few or too old and when the community is too busy just trying to survive and care about their language. But many languages are not in such a serious position. Often, where languages are seriously endangered, there are things that can be done to give them a new life. It is called revitalisation.

Once a community realises that its language is in danger, it can start to introduce measures which can genuinely revitalise. The community itself must want to save its language. The culture of which it is a part must respect minority languages. There needs to be funding to support courses, materials, and teachers. And there need to be linguists to get on with the basic task of putting the language down on paper. That’s the bottom line: getting the language documented - recorded, analysed, and written down. People must be able to read and write if they and their language are to have a future in an increasingly computer-literate civilisation.

D. But can we save a few thousand languages just like that? Yes, if the will and funding were available. It is not cheap to get linguists into the field, train local analysts, support the community with language resources and teachers, compile grammar and dictionaries, and write materials for use in schools. It takes time, lots of it, to revitalise an endangered language. Conditions vary so much that it is difficult to generalise, but a figure of $ 100,000 a year per language cannot be far from the truth. If we devoted that amount of effort over three years for each of the 3,000 languages, we would be talking about some $900 million.

E. There are some famous cases which illustrate what can be done. Welsh, alone among the Celtic languages, is not only stopping its steady decline towards extinction but showing signs of real growth. Two Language Acts protect the status of Welsh now, and its presence is increasingly evident wherever you travel in Wales.

On the other side of the world, Maori in New Zealand has been maintained by a system of so-called ‘language nests’, first introduced in 1982. These are organisations which provide children under five with a domestic setting in which they are intensively exposed to the language. The staff are all Maori speakers from the local community. The hope is that the children will keep their Maori skills alive after leaving the nests and that as they grow older, they will become role models to a new generation of young children. There are cases like this all over the world. And when the reviving language is associated with a degree of political autonomy, the growth can be especially striking, as shown by Faroese, spoken in the Faroe Islands, after the islanders received a measure of autonomy from Denmark.

In Switzerland, Romansch faced a difficult situation, spoken in five very different dialects, with small and diminishing numbers, as young people left their community to work in the German-speaking cities. The solution here was the creation in the 1980s of a unified written language for all these dialects. Romansch Grischun, as it is now called, has official status in parts of Switzerland and is being increasingly used in spoken form on radio and television.

F. A language can be brought back from the very brink of extinction. The Ainu language of Japan, after many years of neglect and repression, had reached a stage where there were only eight fluent speakers left, all elderly. However, new government policies brought fresh attitudes and a positive interest in survival. Several ‘semi­speakers’ - people who had become unwilling to speak Ainu because of the negative attitudes of Japanese speakers - were prompted to become active speakers again. There is fresh interest now, and the language is more publicly available than it has been for years.

G. If good descriptions and materials are available, even extinct languages can be resurrected. Kaurna, from South Australia, is an example. This language had been extinct for about a century but had been quite well documented. So, when a strong movement grew for its revival, it was possible to reconstruct it. Of course, the revised language is not the same as the original. It lacks the range that the original had, and much of the old vocabulary. But it can nonetheless act as a badge of present-day identity for its people. As long as people continue to value it as a true marker of their identity and are prepared to keep using it, it will develop new functions and new vocabulary, as any other living language would.

It is too soon to predict the future of these revived languages, but in some parts of the world, they are attracting precisely the range of positive attitudes and grassroots support, which are the preconditions for language survival. In such unexpected but heart-warming ways, we might see the grand total of languages in the world minimally increased.

Questions 1-2
Complete the sentences below.
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Write your answers in boxes 1-2 on your answer sheet.

Questions 3-7

The list below gives some of the factors that are necessary to assist the revitalisation of a language within a community.
Which of the factors mentioned by the writer of the text will be considered as

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

Questions 8-13

The Reading Passage has SEVEN sections, A-G.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes 8-13 on your answer sheet.