Reading Test
READING PASSAGE 1
Lost for Words
Many minority languages are on the danger list.In the Native American Navajo nation which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-age or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in English. Street sign, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time. Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations - that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. “At the moment, we are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world”, says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. “It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the lost is difficult to know.’ Isolation breeds linguistic diversity as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 language have more than a million speaker, and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000 speakers. What makes a language endangered is not that the number of speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center in Fairblanks.
Why do people reject the language of their parent? It begins with a crisis of confidence, when a small community find itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their
Lost for Words
Many minority languages are on the danger list.In the Native American Navajo nation which sprawls across four states in the American south-west, the native language is dying. Most of its speakers are middle-age or elderly. Although many students take classes in Navajo, the schools are run in English. Street sign, supermarket goods and even their own newspaper are all in English. Not surprisingly, linguists doubt that any native speakers of Navajo will remain in a hundred years’ time. Navajo is far from alone. Half the world’s 6,800 languages are likely to vanish within two generations - that’s one language lost every ten days. Never before has the planet’s linguistic diversity shrunk at such a pace. “At the moment, we are heading for about three or four languages dominating the world”, says Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Reading. “It’s a mass extinction, and whether we will ever rebound from the lost is difficult to know.’ Isolation breeds linguistic diversity as a result, the world is peppered with languages spoken by only a few people. Only 250 language have more than a million speaker, and at least 3,000 have fewer than 2,500. It is not necessarily these small languages that are about to disappear. Navajo is considered endangered despite having 150,000 speakers. What makes a language endangered is not that the number of speakers, but how old they are. If it is spoken by children it is relatively safe. The critically endangered languages are those that are only spoken by the elderly, according to Michael Krauss, director of the Alassk Native Language Center in Fairblanks.
Why do people reject the language of their parent? It begins with a crisis of confidence, when a small community find itself alongside a larger, wealthier society, says Nicholas Ostler of Britain’s Foundation for Endangered Languages, in Bath. ‘People lose faith in their culture’ he says. ‘When the next generation reaches their