Task 4: What do you know about the vocabulary?


The following words are used in the article in Part 3. Discuss with a partner what you think these words mean and write down your definitions. 1. century 2. globalization 3. dominance 4. native speaker 5. billion 6. considerably 7. humanity 8. minority


Task 5: What do you think the text is going to be about? 1. Look at the title of the article. What do you think the author’s argument is going to be?


2. As you read the text, check your predictions for the topic and the language.


Part 3: Reading the text g1 Task 6: Read the following article.


The slow, sad death of languages By the end of the century, there may be only 700


5 10


languages left in the world. Although this may sound a lot, today around 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide. This means that 90% of the world’s languages could disappear within the next 85 years. Every year, around a hundred languages die. The main reason for this is clear. Increased globalization, or Americanization as I call it, has led to the dominance of English, which has clearly become the world’s lingua franca.


Many parents do not want their children to speak their 15


‘mother tongue’ because it will not help them get a job. Many people learn English because it is the language of business. Although more people are native speakers of Chinese than English, more than two billion people – around one-third of the world’s population – can communicate in English to a certain extent.


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The result of this dominance of English is language death. Language death occurs when the last known speaker of a language dies. Although this has happened throughout human history, the process has sped up considerably in recent years. Some people do not care about language death. They think it is something natural. Others think that when a language dies, humanity loses a piece of its culture.


In conclusion, it seems that language death is inevitable. There are arguments on both sides – some who think this is acceptable, others who consider it a bad thing. In my view, I think the international community should be doing more to protect minority languages.


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